The use–mention distinction is a foundational concept of analytic philosophy,[1] according to which it is necessary to make a distinction between using a word (or phrase) and mentioning it,[2][3] and many philosophical works have been "vitiated by a failure to distinguish use and mention".[2] The distinction is disputed by non-analytic philosophers.[4]
The distinction between use and mention can be illustrated for the word cheese:[2][3]
The first sentence is a statement about the substance called cheese; it uses the word "cheese" to refer to that substance. The second is a statement about the word cheese as a signifier; it mentions the word without using it to refer to anything other than itself.
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In written language, mentioned words or phrases often appear between quotation marks ("Chicago" contains three vowels) or in italics (When I say honey, I mean the sweet stuff that bees make), and style authorities such as Strunk and White insist that mentioned words or phrases must always be made visually distinct in this manner. Used words or phrases (much more common than mentioned ones) do not bear any typographic distinction.
If quotation marks are used, it is sometimes the practice to distinguish between the quotation marks used for speech and those used for mentioned words, with double quotes in one place and single in the other:
Many authorities recommend against such a distinction, and prefer one style of quotation mark to be used for both purposes,[5] which is a much more common practice.
The general property of terms changing their reference depending on the context was called suppositio (substitution) by medieval logicians.[6] It describes how one has to substitute a term in a sentence based on its meaning—that is, based on the term's referent. In general, a term can be used in several ways. For nouns, they are:
The last use is what invokes the use–mention distinction.
The use–mention distinction is especially important in analytic philosophy.[7] Failure to properly distinguish use from mention can produce false, misleading, or meaningless statements or category errors. For example, the following correctly distinguish between use and mention:
whereas
would each be considered a use–mention mistake or use–mention confusion.
Stanisław Leśniewski was perhaps the first to make widespread use of this distinction or fallacy, seeing it all around in analytic philosophy of the time, for example in Russell's Principia Mathematica;[8] at the logical level, a use–mention mistake occurs when two heterogeneous levels of meaning or context are confused inadvertently.
Donald Davidson told that in his student years, "quotation was usually introduced as a somewhat shady device, and the introduction was accompanied by a stern sermon on the sin of confusing the use and mention of expressions". He presented a class of sentences like
which both use the meaning of the quoted words to complete the sentence, and mention them as they are attributed to W. V. Quine, to argue against his teachers' hard distinction. His claim was that quotations could not be analyzed as simple expressions that mention their content by means of naming it or describing its parts, as sentences like the above would lose their exact, twofold meaning.[9]
Self-referential statements mention themselves or their components, often producing logical paradoxes, such as Quine's paradox. A mathematical analogy of self-referential statements lies at the core of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. There are many examples of self reference and use–mention distinction in the works of Douglas Hofstadter, who makes the distinction thus:
Although the standard notation for mentioning a term in philosophy and logic is to put the term in quotation marks, issues arise when the mention is itself of a mention. Notating using italics might require a potentially infinite number of typefaces, while putting quotation marks within quotation marks may lead to ambiguity.[11]
Some analytic philosophers have said the distinction "may seem rather pedantic."[2]
In a 1977 response to analytic philosopher John Searle, Jacques Derrida mentioned the distinction as "rather laborious and problematical".[4]
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