A defense of the description theory of quotation
山形賴之 (Yoriyuki Yamagata)

National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology
This talk presents a defense of the description theory of quotation against Davidson’s famousattacks [2]. We identify his attacks to the description theory as objections comprised fourproblems. The first problem is “impure” quotation and mixed cases of use and mention. The
second problem is the behavior of quotation in the context of quantification. The third problem
is a picture-like property of quotation. The final problem is the problem of possibly infinite
alphabets. For the first problem, we introduce the naming relation Name(d, n) between objects
and expressions, which states that d has a name n. For example, the famous Quine sentence
Quine says that quotation ‘. . . has a certain anomalous feature’.
is interpreted toQuine says that Name(quotation) :: «has a certain anomalous feature »where Name(quotation) is the unique name of the object “quotation” and :: is concatenation.
«· · · »is nothing to do with quotation in the object language and should be understood as theabbreviation of the term obtained by the description theory. Mixed cases of use and mention
is also handled nicely.
Dhaulagiri is adjacent to Anapurna, the mountain whose conquest quest Maurice Herzog
described in his book of the same name.
can be interpreted toDhaulagiri is adjacent to Anapurna∧∃n.Name(Anapuran, n) ∧ Name(ιx.Maurice Herzog described x in his book , n)In the second objection, Davidson rightly argues that from
“Alice swooned” is a sentence(1)∃x.“x swooned” is a sentence.

(2)

we cannot infer1

Further, Davidson argues, again rightly, that the description theory infers from (1) to∃x.x :: “swooned” is a sentence.

(3)∃x, y.x :: y is a sentence.

(4)

and, further,and goes on to the conclusion “quotation marks play no vital role in the spelling theory; andalso that this theory is not a theory of how quotation works in natural language.” However, thisexample shows the vital role of quotation inside of quantification: quotation blocks influenceof quantification to variables inside of quotation. The description theory predicts the behavior
that inference from (1) to (2) is not possible but to (3) is possible, because Name(‘x’) ̸=«Alice ». We note that the counterpart of inference from (1) to (3) can be obtained by impure
quotation. Consider the sentence.
Quine says that ‘quotation has a certain anomalous feature’.

(5)

Then, we can infer
Quine says that quotation ‘...has a certain anomalous feature’.
Then, further we can infer
There is something which Quine says that it ‘...has a certain anomalous feature’.

(6)

It is clear that (6) corresponds (3). The third objection, about picture-like property of quantification, we argue that Davidson confuses a semantic requirement with a syntactic requirement.
Because our goal is to build a semantic theory of quotation, we have to keep a structure of aquoted expression intact as a semantic value. Therefore, the proper name theory should berejected. However, as a semantic theory, there is no need to keep the structure of the quoted
expression in tact in the paraphrased sentence in the syntactic level, therefore Davidson’sargument against the description theory is misguided. The description theory, in fact, keeps
the structure of a quoted expression in tact as a semantic value, which is same to the original
expression. Finally, we come to the last objection. Unfortunately, here there seems no easy
defense for the description because we assume there is only finite alphabets. However, we may
argue that possible alphabets are finite in the end, because of the finite nature of human cognitive competence. Another escape route would be to deny Davidson’s finite semantic primitive
thesis [1] as untenable. （講演は日本語で行われます）

参考文献[1] Donald Davidson. Theories of meaning and learnable languages. 1965.
[2] Donald Davidson. Quotation. Theory and decision, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 27–40, 1979.

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