In analytic philosophy, [1] a fundamental distinction is made between the use of a term and the mere mention of it. [2] [3] Many philosophical works have been "vitiated by a failure to distinguish use and mention". [2] The distinction can sometimes be pedantic, especially in simple cases where it is obvious. [2] [4]
The distinction between use and mention can be illustrated with 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.
In written language, mentioned words or phrases often appear between single or double quotation marks or in italics. In philosophy, single quotation marks are typically used, while in other fields (such as linguistics) italics are more common. [5] Some style authorities, such as Strunk and White, emphasize that mentioned words or phrases should be visually distinct. On the other hand, used words or phrases do not carry typographic markings. [6]
The phenomenon of a term having different references in various contexts was referred to as suppositio (substitution) by medieval logicians. [7] A substitution describes how a term is substituted in a sentence based on its referent. For nouns, a term can be used in different ways:
The use–mention distinction is particularly significant in analytic philosophy. [8] Confusing use with mention can lead to misleading or incorrect statements, such as category errors.
Self-referential statements also engage the use–mention distinction and are often central to logical paradoxes, such as Quine's paradox. In mathematics, this concept appears in Gödel's incompleteness theorem, where the diagonal lemma plays a crucial role.
Stanisław Leśniewski extensively employed this distinction, noting the fallacies that can result from confusing it in Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica . [9]
Donald Davidson argued that quotation cannot always be treated as mere mention, giving examples where quotations carry both use and mention functions. [10]
Douglas Hofstadter explains the distinction between use and mention as follows: [11]
When a word is used to refer to something, it is being used. When a word is quoted, the focus is on its surface aspects, such as typography or phonetics, and it is being mentioned.
Issues arise when a mention itself is mentioned. Notating this with italics or repeated quotation marks can lead to ambiguity. [12]
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]
The Berry paradox is a self-referential paradox arising from an expression like "The smallest positive integer not definable in under sixty letters".
In metaphysics, nominalism is the view that universals and abstract objects do not actually exist other than being merely names or labels. There are at least two main versions of nominalism. One version denies the existence of universals – things that can be instantiated or exemplified by many particular things. The other version specifically denies the existence of abstract objects – objects that do not exist in space and time.
In the philosophy of language, a proper name – examples include a name of a specific person or place – is a name which ordinarily is taken to uniquely identify its referent in the world. As such it presents particular challenges for theories of meaning, and it has become a central problem in analytic philosophy. The common-sense view was originally formulated by John Stuart Mill in A System of Logic (1843), where he defines it as "a word that answers the purpose of showing what thing it is that we are talking about but not of telling anything about it". This view was criticized when philosophers applied principles of formal logic to linguistic propositions. Gottlob Frege pointed out that proper names may apply to imaginary or nonexistent entities, without becoming meaningless, and he showed that sometimes more than one proper name may identify the same entity without having the same sense, so that the phrase "Homer believed the morning star was the evening star" could be meaningful and not tautological in spite of the fact that the morning star and the evening star identifies the same referent. This example became known as Frege's puzzle and is a central issue in the theory of proper names.
Willard Van Orman Quine was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century". He served as the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard University from 1956 to 1978.
Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was a German philosopher, logician, and mathematician. He was a mathematics professor at the University of Jena, and is understood by many to be the father of analytic philosophy, concentrating on the philosophy of language, logic, and mathematics. Though he was largely ignored during his lifetime, Giuseppe Peano (1858–1932), Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), and, to some extent, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) introduced his work to later generations of philosophers. Frege is widely considered to be the greatest logician since Aristotle, and one of the most profound philosophers of mathematics ever.
Analytic philosophy is an analysis focused, broad, contemporary movement or tradition within Western philosophy, especially anglophone philosophy. Analytic philosophy is characterized by a clarity of prose; rigor in arguments; and making use of formal logic and mathematics, and, to a lesser degree, the natural sciences. It is further characterized by an interest in language and meaning known as the linguistic turn. It has developed several new branches of philosophy and logic, notably philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science, modern predicate logic and mathematical logic.
George Stephen Boolos was an American philosopher and a mathematical logician who taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In logic and linguistics, a metalanguage is a language used to describe another language, often called the object language. Expressions in a metalanguage are often distinguished from those in the object language by the use of italics, quotation marks, or writing on a separate line. The structure of sentences and phrases in a metalanguage can be described by a metasyntax. For example, to say that the word "noun" can be used as a noun in a sentence, one could write "noun" is a <noun>.
Quine's paradox is a paradox concerning truth values, stated by Willard Van Orman Quine. It is related to the liar paradox as a problem, and it purports to show that a sentence can be paradoxical even if it is not self-referring and does not use demonstratives or indexicals. The paradox can be expressed as follows:
"Two Dogmas of Empiricism" is a paper by analytic philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine published in 1951. According to University of Sydney professor of philosophy Peter Godfrey-Smith, this "paper [is] sometimes regarded as the most important in all of twentieth-century philosophy". The paper is an attack on two central aspects of the logical positivists' philosophy: the first being the analytic–synthetic distinction between analytic truths and synthetic truths, explained by Quine as truths grounded only in meanings and independent of facts, and truths grounded in facts; the other being reductionism, the theory that each meaningful statement gets its meaning from some logical construction of terms that refer exclusively to immediate experience.
A referential theory of meaning is a theory of language that claims that the meaning of a word or expression lies in what it points out in the world. The word tree may have an exterior meaning from the one always intended, that is, tree can be translated into different form of meaning. The object denoted by a word is called its referent. Criticisms of this position are often associated with Ludwig Wittgenstein.
The analytic–synthetic distinction is a semantic distinction used primarily in philosophy to distinguish between propositions that are of two types: analytic propositions and synthetic propositions. Analytic propositions are true or not true solely by virtue of their meaning, whereas synthetic propositions' truth, if any, derives from how their meaning relates to the world.
A priori and a posteriori are Latin phrases used in philosophy to distinguish types of knowledge, justification, or argument by their reliance on experience. A priori knowledge is independent from any experience. Examples include mathematics, tautologies and deduction from pure reason. A posteriori knowledge depends on empirical evidence. Examples include most fields of science and aspects of personal knowledge.
Philosophy of language investigates the nature of language and the relations between language, language users, and the world. Investigations may include inquiry into the nature of meaning, intentionality, reference, the constitution of sentences, concepts, learning, and thought.
Czesław Lejewski was a Polish philosopher and logician, and a member of the Lwow-Warsaw School of Logic. He studied under Jan Łukasiewicz and Karl Popper in the London School of Economics, and W. V. O. Quine.
Philosophy of logic is the area of philosophy that studies the scope and nature of logic. It investigates the philosophical problems raised by logic, such as the presuppositions often implicitly at work in theories of logic and in their application. This involves questions about how logic is to be defined and how different logical systems are connected to each other. It includes the study of the nature of the fundamental concepts used by logic and the relation of logic to other disciplines. According to a common characterisation, philosophical logic is the part of the philosophy of logic that studies the application of logical methods to philosophical problems, often in the form of extended logical systems like modal logic. But other theorists draw the distinction between the philosophy of logic and philosophical logic differently or not at all. Metalogic is closely related to the philosophy of logic as the discipline investigating the properties of formal logical systems, like consistency and completeness.
Cognitive synonymy is a type of synonymy in which synonyms are so similar in meaning that they cannot be differentiated either denotatively or connotatively, that is, not even by mental associations, connotations, emotive responses, and poetic value. It is a stricter technical definition of synonymy, specifically for theoretical purposes. In usage employing this definition, synonyms with greater differences are often called near-synonyms rather than synonyms.
This is an index of Wikipedia articles in philosophy of language
This is a list of articles in analytic philosophy.
Working from Within: The Nature and Development of Quine's Naturalism is a 2018 book by Dutch philosopher and historian of analytic philosophy Sander Verhaegh. Released at a time in which there was increasing work done on Willard Van Orman Quine in the history of analytic philosophy, the book was the first to provide a full account of the historical development of his naturalism. It was also the first book to use the extensive archive materials on Quine at Harvard University's Houghton Library.
In this 1995 paper, Boolos discussed ambiguities in using quotation marks as part of a formal language, and proposed a way of distinguishing levels of mentioning using a finite number of marks.