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The use–mention distinction (sometimes referred to as the words-as-words distinction) is the distinction between using a word (or phrase) and mentioning it. It arises in the context of grammar and philosophy.
The distinction between use and mention can be illustrated for the word cheese:
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 quotation marks ("Chicago" contains three vowels) or in italics (When I say honey, I mean the sweet stuff that bees make), and some authorities 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 quotes 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, which is in practice much more common.
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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.
Violation or neglect of the use–mention distinction can produce sentences that sound and appear similar to the original, but have an entirely different meaning. For example:
is literally true because the two phrases in it are not the same, whereas
is not true, and
may or may not be true.
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:
The general property of terms changing their reference depending on the context was called suppositio (substitution) by classical logicians. 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. The standard notation for mentioning a term in philosophy and logic is to put it in quotation marks. Notating using italics might require a potentially infinite number of typefaces.
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.
Donald Davidson talks of it as an important distinction for any student of analytic philosophy: "When I was initiated into the mysteries of logic and semantics, 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".
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; at the logical level, a use–mention mistake occurs when two heterogeneous levels of meaning or context are confused inadvertently.