Lukáš Novák on Use and Mention

From a comment in a now fast-receding earlier thread:

An editor trying to impose a clear use-mention distinction on authors soon realises that most certainly words can be both used and mentioned, and that it is not inherently wrong. BTW, the Scholastics believed that in the case of the so-called material supposition it is regularly the case: cf. "man is a noun" (note the lack of quotes around "man"); and the apparatus of material supposition cannot be always equivalently "translated" into the "quoting" convention.

There are also some interesting cases involving quotes:

- Nietzsche said that "God is dead".

Here the phrase "God is dead" is both used to complete the sentence, and mentioned as that what Nietzsche literally said.

Scare quotes:

- I cannot wait to hear and refute Peter's "arguments".

"Arguments" is both used to refer disparagingly to what Peter presents as arguments, and mentioned as the word Peter actually uses.

To be clear, the issue is not whether words can be both used and mentioned, but whether some words can be both used and mentioned in the same sentence or clause or phrase.  The answer, I think, is yes. The challenge is to find crystal-clear examples.

When I am quoting an actual person's words, I use double quotation marks. These are genuine quotation marks. When I am not quoting, but mentioning a word, phrase, clause, or sentence, I use single 'quotation' marks as in:

'Boston' is disyllabic.

Please note that the indentation, as just performed, serves a mentioning function but without the messiness of additional 'quotation' marks.

Besides quoting and mentioning there is also sneering/scaring. For sneering/scaring I use single 'quotation' marks as in

There is nothing liberal about contemporary 'liberals.'

and

I use single 'quotation' marks to show that a word is being misused or analogically extended.

You can begin to see from this what a punctilious pedant and language Nazi I am.  There are other niceties and puzzles relating to all of this, but let's proceed to Dr. Novak's examples, starting with the last one. This is a very interesting case, but it doesn't seem to me to be a totally clear example of a word being both used and mentioned. Simplify the example:

Peter's 'arguments' are fallacious.

No doubt, 'arguments' is being used in this sentence. Or rather, " 'arguments' " is being used in this sentence. But I don't see that it is being mentioned. The inverted commas signal that the word is being used in an extended or improper way to refer to something that really ought not be called an argument. An extended use is not a mention. 

Novak's second example is:

Nietzsche said that "God is dead."

But this is not a good English sentence, and so does not constitute a clear example. One must write either

(a) Nietzsche said that God is dead

or

(b) Nietzsche said, "God is dead."

In (a), 'that God is dead' is being used to refer to the content of Nietzsche's assertion, while in (b) the sentence Nietzsche wrote is mentioned.

 

Novak's first example is:

Man is a noun. 

I'm sorry, but that is just false. 'Man' is a noun, not man. 'Man' is monosyllabic, but no man is monosyllabic.  'Man' is a word, but no man is a word.

Finally, an example that seems to work:

Big Bill Broonzy was so-called because of his size.

Clearly the name is being used to refer to a black bluesman. But that he was called 'Big Bill Broonzy' because of his size is also conveyed by the sentence. The name is therefore both used and (implicitly) mentioned in the same sentence. 

Comments

[The London Ostrich]

Bertrand Russell (Our Knowledge of the External World) ‘every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and purification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical’.

‘The word’ mentions the last word of the sentence (‘logical’). The last word itself uses it.

[BV]

Good example. We seem to have established something in philosophy! What we have established, however, is so miserably picayune as to be scarcely worth mentioning.

[The London Ostrich]

Not just picayune (of little value or significance) but miserably so.

[BV]

You understand that that my comment was not a slam against you since it was I, after all, who raised the issue in the first place.

I take it your English love of understatement, or rather, distaste for exaggeration, is at work.

Can you name the newspaper of a major U. S. city that has 'picayune' in its title?

[The London Ostrich]

Only after I looked it up on Google.

I wonder if the English really do love understatement.