General: "Quotation is a device used to refer to typographical or phonetic shapes by exhibiting samples, that is, inscriptions or utterances that have those shapes."
1) The Proper-name Theory. "A quotation, consisting of an expression flanked by quotation marks, is like a single word and is to be regarded as logically simple. The letters and spaces...are viewed as accidents in the spelling of a longer word...A quotation mark name is thus, Tarski says, like the proper name of a man." (81-82).
Thus: [[`Ann']] = Ann (the word, not the person) [?--not sure if this is right]
Davidson writes: "The merit of this approach...is the emphasis it puts on the fact that the reference of a quotation cannot be construed as owed, at least in any normal way, to the reference of the expressions displayed within the quotation marks. But...[i]f quotations are structureless singular terms, then there is no more significance to the category of quotation-mark names than to the category of names that begin and end with the letter 'a'. On this view, there is no relation, beyond an accident of spelling, between an expression and the quotation-mark name of that expression. And so no echo remains, as far as this theory of quotation goes, of the informal rules governing quotation that seem so clear: if you want to form a quotation-mark name of an expression, flank that expression with quotation marks." (83)
[I'm not sure what's so wrong with that...it's not accidental, but also not entirely necessary, that e.g. `the n-word' is a name for a particular word.]
The big objection: "on this theory we cannot give a satisfactory account of the conditions under which an arbitrary sentence containing a quotation is true...on the theory of quotation we are considering, quotation-mark names have no significant structure. It follows that a theory of truth could not be made to cover generally sentences containing quotations. We must reject the proper-name interpretation of quotation is we want a satisfactory theory for a language containing quotations" (83).
[I'm not sure this is right, either. It might be right for theories of mixed quotation: "Quine said that quotation Fred" is pretty strange. But why couldn't e.g. `the n-word' be the name of a word construed as a particular part of speech--that is, a word construed as a member of a particular semantic type? That seems fine: "Joe called Bill the n-word" seems well-formed.]
2) The picture-theory of quotation. This is the Fregean-inspired notion that quotation marks create a special context within which words name themselves. On this view, the quotation does have internal structure, since the quotation marks are distinct from what comes within. (No more "Quine said that quotation Fred.") It is, as Davidson remarks, "reminiscent of Frege's theory of opaque (what he called oblique) contexts such as those created by [attitude verbs.]"
Objection: "The trouble with the picture theory, as with Frege's treatment of opaque contexts generally, is that the references attributed to words or expressions in their special contexts are not functions of their references in ordinary contexts, and so special context-creating expressions...cannot be viewed as functional expressions." (85).
[Well, we could always generalize to the worst case! Here, one case that needs to be generalized to is "Lagadonian."]
3) The Spelling (aka Description) Theory. A single word in quotation marks names itself, but a quoted longer expression is structured. For example `Alice swooned' is 'the expression got by writing 'Alice' followed by `swooned.'"
Davidson writes that "there is no difficulty about extending a truth definition to these devices of spelling suggested." But he complains:
"nothing of the idea of quotation marks is captured by this theory--nothing of the idea that one can form the name of an arbitrary expression by enclosing it in quotation marks. On the spelling theory, no articulate item in the vocabulary corresponds to quotation marks, and so the theory cannot reflect a rule for this use." (87)
Davidson then goes on to present as damning evidence the availability of inferences like
`Alice swooned' is a sentence.
Ex (`x swooned' is a sentence).
which, for the spelling theory, would be e.g.
alc^`swooned' is a sentence. [where `alc' denotes the name `Alice']
Ex (x^`swooned' is a sentence )
The deficiencies in accounting for the natural language use of quotation are then that it cannot account for mixed quotation, and it cannot account for the introduction of new notation: "An important use for quotation in natural language is to introduce new notation by displaying it between quotation marks; this is impossible on the spelling theory provided the new notation is not composed of elements that have names." [This confuses me bit, because, in English, at least, the elements always *do* have names...also, given Lagadonian conventions, this is not a problem, because as soon as you know the name, you know the element it names, and vice-versa.]
Now, we have list of desiderata for a theory of quotation:
1. It "merge[s] with a general theory of truth for the sentences of the language." (Not knowing what this means in Davidsonian-ese, I will gloss this as: "it must be compositional.")
2. The theory must provide a semantic role for devices of quotation (marks or hand gestures, etc.) [Is this tendentious?...it seems that Washington/Reimer will reject this.) This is because there is a "rule of quotation" that speakers are able to learn and apply in countless ways.
3. The theory must "explain the sense in which a quotation pictures what is referred to, otherwise it will be inadequate to account for important uses of quotation, for example, to introduce novel pieces of notation in new alphabets." [I'm not so sure about this. The latter half can be taken care of by assuming a Lagadonian convention. The first part is just a question of how well a metaphor is cashed. That's elusive to someone like me, who had a poor grip on the metaphor in the first place.]
4. [inferred from remarks on pg 90] We must balance the conflicting demands of the picture theory (which somehow pushes is towards an unstructured view) and the demand for structure imposed by the requirement of compositionality. The punchline: "enough structure will be too much so long as we regard the quoted material as part of the semantically significant syntax of a sentence. The cure is therefore to give up this assumption."
So the idea is that the quotation marks are demonstrating a shape by ostending something (an inscription) with that shape (this is deferred ostenstion, then...perhaps the only way we can ostend universals like shape.) The semantically significant part of a sentence like
"cat" has three letters.
is the quotation marks themselves, which (jointly?) constitute a demonstrative, as in
That_1 has three letters.
[wait...doesn't this fly in the face of all of those claims that demonstratives are "directly referential"?:
``the position that the semantic content of a name or other directly referring expression is nothing more than the referent: the referent is all that the name contributes to a proposition expressed by a sentence containing it. (SEP)"]
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