Language, Action and Thought

A venerable distinction in the philosophy of language is that between use and mention. Philosophers agree that this distinction isn’t exclusive: ‘a dream’ is simultaneously used and mentioned in:
- Martin Luther King said that he had ‘a dream’.
Perhaps it isn’t even exhaustive. For example, it is sometimes argued that ‘brother’ is neither used nor mentioned in this meaning attribution:
- In Italian, ‘fratello’ means brother.
A natural reply is that the sentence is shorthand for
- In Italian, ‘fratello’ means the same as ‘brother’,
where ‘brother’ is mentioned. I think this reply is wrong. After briefly explaining why, in this talk I defend an original theory of meaning attributions, which consists of three claims:
The expression in the complement position of ‘means’ is displayed to exhibit its customary meaning (just like sometimes a patch is displayed to exhibit its colour).
The exhibited meaning is picked out by a covert dedicated context-sensitive expression.
In addition to providing a truth-conditional contribution, ‘means’ is responsible for triggering the display-affair on its right – it acts as display-prompting device. This peculiar role of ‘means’ can be accommodated in terms of a constraint that ‘means’ imposes on the use of the attribution (a constraint that I spell out in terms of a suitable contextual restriction).
Afterwards, I discuss further applications of the mode of analysis defended for meaning attributions, focusing on some uses of the verbs ‘pronounce’ and ‘be like’. Finally, I try to show how my approach, combined with other views, may shed some light on the phenomenon of mention.