Talk:Use–mention distinction

message: The example under "journalism" is way out of date - as it turns out, some of the allegations were true and Jeffrey Archer is a crook. Anyone think of a new one? Onebyone 18:24, 17 Nov 2003 (UTC)
thread_title:  ''Journalism'' section 

message: Perhaps I'm misinterpreting it, but the part about violating the use-mention distinction strikes me as ambiguous and confusing.  It previously read:
Violation of the use-mention distinction can produce sentences that sound and appear similar to the original, but have an entirely different meaning.  For example,
: "The use-mention distinction" is not "strictly enforced here".
is literally true because the two phrases in it are not the same.
First, to comply with Manual of Style, I propose the example sentence be re-formatted as: The use-mention distinction is not strictly enforced here.
More importantly, I think the explanatory sentence needs to be re-worded.  What constitutes a "violation" of the use-mention distinction?  I'm not sure you can violate a distinction, although you may make a distinction ambiguous, or eliminate a distinction.  I interpret the example sentence as demonstrating a case where the use-mention distinction may be ambiguous.  The explanatory sentence also refers to "the original" - what is "the original" here?  There is only one example given, although the sentence implies a second (or first, actually).  I'm having trouble coming up with a good alternate version, but I have revised the section as follows:
For example, the two versions of a seemingly-paradoxical statement below can be interpreted to have two distinct meanings, one of which resolves the apparent paradox:
*The use-mention distinction is not strictly enforced here.
*The use-mention distinction is not strictly enforced here.
This statement (Putting a statement in quotation marks and attributing it to its originator is a useful way of turning a disputed statement about a subject into an undisputed statement about another statement.) is also problematic, particularly the "disputed/undisputed" business.  It seems unencyclopedic to me. Schi 19:41, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: At first I didn't understand the example sentences, until I saw the explanatory material in this discussion which apparently used to be in the article itself: "... is literally true because the two phrases in it are not the same." As it is now, it is hard to tell what the second sentence means. The old explanation should be put back in. And shouldn't the word the be in italics too, since it's part of the phrase? 24.159.255.29 05:40, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

text: I think you're right about misinterpreting it, Schi.  What is being violated is not a distinction, but a rule or recommendation known as "the use-mention distinction." Unfree (talk) 20:38, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: "Violation"

message: I think the conversation below is relevant to the use-mention distinction.  Whether it is useful to link to is a different matter.  Any comments?  I see that Haddocks' Eyes mentions this article. This connection may already have been discussed here.
There is a passage in Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll in which the White Knight proposes to comfort Alice by singing her a song:
:"Is it very long?" Alice asked, for she had heard a good deal of poetry that day.
:"It's long," said the Knight, "but it's very, very beautiful. Everybody that hears me sing it--either it brings the tears into their eyes, or else--"
:"Or else what?" said Alice, for the Knight had made a sudden pause.
:"Or else it doesn't, you know. The name of the song is called 'Haddock's Eyes'."
:"Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?" Alice said, trying to feel interested.
:"No, you don't understand," the Knight said, looking a little vexed. "That's what the name is called. The name really is 'The Aged Aged Man'."
:"Then I ought to have said 'That's what the song is called?'" Alice corrected herself.
:"No, you oughtn't: that's quite another thing! The song is called 'Ways and Means': but that's only what it's called, you know!"
:"Well, what is the song, then?" said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.
:"I was coming to that," the Knight said. "The song really is 'A-sitting on a Gate': and the tune's my own invention."
Wanderer57 16:25, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Alice Through the Looking Glass 

message: Shouldn't "use-mention" incorporate a hyphen?  When I pasted it (from the beginning of the article) into Notepad and saved it, it didn't.  For example, saving it as ANSI shows the character as hex 96, whereas the hyphen is hex 2d.  I don't know how hex 96 should be rendered (in codepage 437, it's a lowercase u-caret), but perhaps a dash was entered by mistake.  My browser (Firefox) apparently renders it as a dash. Unfree (talk) 20:21, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It's an en dash. Typographical sticklers like to use that instead of a hyphen for compound modifiers when the two words are being related to each other in a symmetric way. See Hyphen#Compound_modifiers. 155.212.242.34 (talk) 19:22, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Hyphen

message: First sentence is:  "The use–mention distinction is the distinction between using a word (or phrase, etc.) and mentioning it."
However, the rest of the paragraph is devoted to how the distinction is represented typographically.  I think this is premature as the definition of the U-M distinction has not yet been made clear (at least in IMHO.)
I think the concept of "use-mention distinction" can be better explained if the word "mention" does not have to be used in the explanation. My attempt at a revised explanation follows.
:The use–mention distinction is the distinction between using a word (or phrase, etc.) to refer to the "thing" it represents, and discussing the word itself.
:For example, the following sentences illustrate the use-mention distinction.
:* Cheese is made from milk.
:* Cheese is derived from a word in Old English.
:The first sentence is a statement about cheese.  The second is a statement about the word "cheese".
::This could be said more briefly as follows:
::*Cheese is made from milk. (This is a statement about cheese.)
::*"Cheese" is derived from a word in Old English. (This is a statement about the word "cheese".)
I find the following sentence confusing. "The use–mention distinction is the distinction between using a word (or phrase, etc.) and mentioning it."  In everyday speech, it could be said that both of the example sentences use the word "cheese".
I may be way off-base.  Someone else please take a look.  Thanks.  Wanderer57 (talk) 00:09, 6 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Comments re explanation of the concept of U-M Distinction 

message: Discussion moved from Talk:Use/mention fallacy.
This page (Use/mention fallacy) has been removed twice (ie replaced with the original redirect to Use-mention distinction). On the second occasion, Snalwibma at least had the common courtesy to follow policy and provide an edit summary. Since the article was my contribution, and since I feel that Wikipedia should include an article on this subject, I am responding here.
The edit summary states: "This page is nothing but WP:OR. There is no "fallacy". Best as a redirect"
The last point might have force if use/mention fallacies were defined on the redirect page, but they are not. Indeed, they are not mentioned at all. Furthermore, I can make no sense of the second point. Interpreted as "there is no such recognised thing as a use/mention fallacy" it is obviously false, as can easily be shown by a google search (=use mention fallacy). The first ten results alone include citable examples dating back more than three decades. (Specifically, John R Searle's December 1976 review of "Toward a Linguistic Theory of Speech Acts" by Jerrold M Sadock in Language: "There seems to me to be several massive use-mention fallacies in this .... But this has the effect of building a persistent use-mention fallacy into ...") I don't want to insult Snalwibma's intelligence by implying he or she didn't bother to try this search, but I can't otherwise understand the criticism.
I'm less sure of my ground when it comes to the allegation of WP:OR. The example isn't mine, but I got it from the oral tradition (and changed 'nigger' to 'honky', mainly because I'm white myself), so can't cite anything to justify it. But I don't accept that inventing illustrative examples counts as WP:OR. If it did, the consequences for Wikipedia would be unfortunate, for whereas it might just be possible to quote a citable definition under fair use of copyright, quoting copyrighted examples is surely not on. So contributors must invent them if we are avoid an encyclopedia of merely abstract prose that only makes sense if you already know what it means. (As if there weren't enough of that in Wikipedia already.)
Accordingly, I am minded to recreate this page with a couple of suitable citations added. -PRNG4u (talk) 05:09, 3 September 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: My take on this would be that it isn't a fallacy, just a misunderstanding. Someone who fails to see that in "Anyone who uses 'honky' is racist" the word honky is mentioned but not used simply does not grasp the use-mention distinction. Where is the fallacy? I grant that some writers have used the word fallacy in referring to the use-mention distinction, but we do not need an article on every variation in terminology. We do not have separate articles on Atlantic puffin and Fratercula arctica: one is a redirect to the other. Same in this case. It may well be worth adding a few lines about possible misunderstandings to the article on use-mention distinction, and I'd be happy to see the question of whether it's a fallacy discussed there (with reference to appropriate reliable sources such as that mentioned above) - but this minor terminological variation does not merit a separate spin-off article. SNALWIBMA ( talk - contribs ) 05:35, 3 September 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: The "racist" example from Use/mention fallacy is still very useful to show the average person (and Derrida, too) that the pedantic seeming distinction can matter in everyday life. Can we add it to this article? --Florian Blaschke (talk) 14:52, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Use/mention "fallacy" 

message: Apparently Heathrow airport security does not understand the use-mention distinction. 71.141.88.54 (talk) 08:03, 10 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: This is not a blog. While some may find the story amusing, what is needed is something more along the lines of an article in a philosophy journal that discusses the article in terms of the use-mention distinction. And confusion between an image and what it depicts is not actually a use-mention error in the technical sense this article is about. Finally, passengers find depictions of and talk about weapons alarming, and this is about excluding those, not just the weapons themselves. -- 72.205.126.89 (talk) 06:41, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Heathrow airport 

message: In the very clause of "My name is Colin", it's generally seen as rather silly to keep the distinction. Yet, things like "My name is stupid" and even proper nouns like "My name is Norwegian" are still viable sentences. Should this be confronted in the Grammar bit? 62.49.60.71 (talk) 11:14, 9 May 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  My name is "Colin" 

message: Is "passionately" in this sentence a noun or an adverb?  Or are there inerrant problems in this thinking?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 111.69.241.31 (talk) 09:44, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Good point. I vote honorary noun, just for the occasion. 62.49.60.71 (talk) 10:41, 28 May 2012 (UTC)

text: All quotations can be used syntactically like nouns, even whole sentences. It would be silly to say that a sentence as such changes into a noun when quoted. Think of it like that-clauses: "I have learned that cheese derives from milk." I think we'll agree that "cheese derives from milk" is a sentence, and "that cheese derives from milk" is a clause; however, being a clause, it cannot be classified as being in the word-class noun. It is a nominal clause and can thus be used like a noun, for example as a subject or object in a sentence like "I have learned X" or "X is true". --Florian Blaschke (talk) 14:29, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

text: Ask a linguist or philosopher. This is not a blog or Q&A page for discussing the subject of the article, it's a page for discussing how to improve the article. (This itself is a sort of use-mention distinction that many people new to Wikipedia don't grasp.) [FWIW, the answer is "neither", because there is no word "passionately" in the sentence, there's a quotation, "passionately", which is not a word at all] -- 72.205.126.89 (talk) 06:49, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Do words change sense when they are mentioned? 

message: :Prefixing a term with the phrase "so-called" can also be used to convey a use–mention distinction.
I think this is misleading. The normal use of "so-called" does not so much convey a use-mention distinction as introduce one. Compare these sentences:
:A. Your democracy failed to protect us.
:B. Your so-called democracy failed to protect us.
In both sentences, the word 'democracy' is used, and the primary meaning of both sentences is the same. However, in sentence B, the word 'democracy' is mentioned in addition to being used; it is mentioned in order to disclaim its use in that very sentence. In fact, sentence B is essentially an abbreviated version of:
:C. Your democracy (if 'democracy' is the right word) failed to protect us.
which makes the use and the mention explicit and distinct. Google turns up a similar example from Quine:
:Giorgione was so-called because of his size.
means
:Giorgione was called 'Giorgione' because of his size.
"So-called" adds use-mention complexities to a sentence; it is not used to clarify the distinction in an existing sentence, as quote marks or italics are. As it stands, the article gives the impression that it would be correct to say:
:D. So-called democracy has nine letters.
So I'm reversing the edit in question. DanielCristofani (talk) 21:56, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  "So-called" 

message: ‘The distinction is disputed by non-analytic philosophers.[4]’
I think mentioning this so prominently and early in the article is giving it undue weight and going against the WP:DUE guideline.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.139.82.82 (talk) 19:04, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  WP:DUE 

message: This article indicates that medieval philosophers were aware of it. But then how long did it take before there was a general awareness of the idea?  Today, everybody seems to understand the distinction between cow and 'cow.' We even have a standard way of making the distinction using single quotation marks. How far back do we have to go to see that people were not generally aware of the distinction? 
Thayer's Greek-English lexicon suggests that it may have been mostly unknown in the first century. His explication of ὄνομα (the ancestor of our word 'name') states that: "the name is used for everything which the name covers, everything the thought or feeling of which is aroused in the mind by mentioning, hearing, remembering, the name, i.e. for one's rank, authority, interests, pleasure, command, excellences, deeds etc." A convenient online reference for this quote is https://www.laparola.net/greco/parola.php?p=ὄνομα
Page Notes (talk) 23:32, 25 May 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: This isn't a Q&A page or a discussion page about the subject of the article, it's for improving the article. (This itself is a sort of use-mention distinction that many people fail to grasp. (Also, it's not at all clear that the quoted statement suggests anything of the sort.) -- 72.205.126.89 (talk) 06:58, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

text: Anyway, it's implicit in the ordinary workings of most human languages -- "He said `Go to hell!'" vs. "Go to hell!" for example.  The speaker is cursing out the listener in the second sentence (use), but not in the first (mention).  In that sense, it's likely to have been around for many thousands of years... AnonMoos (talk) 07:32, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  How old is the use-mention distinction? 

message: MIT OCW 6.001 Lecture 3b-symbolic-differentiation-quotation at 18m19s
It appears that for the sake of the recording, they planted these responses in the audience. But the usual game is that it takes a while for a student to understand the answer the professor is looking for is "your name", and so I think this is a fun way to illustrate the use-mention distinction. If not this video, then perhaps another can be used.
Intellec7 (talk) 01:11, 5 February 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Excerpt from Programming Lecture