You can call me 'stupid', ... just don't call me stupid

Abstract

As most of us know, Quine was the author of the wonderful twentieth-century philosophy book Word and Object. Most of us also know that the following is true: Saul Kripke would complain that although what I meant to convey with (1) is true, I expressed that truth in “sloppy, colloquial speech”.1 He would say that I have made the horrifying philosophical blunder of confusing use and mention: in using the phrase ‘was called Willard’, I used the name ‘Willard’ where I should have mentioned it instead.2 The proper statement of that truth should be written, he would claim, as follows: This claim was key to his rejection of an entire class of description theories of proper names: those which he took to violate his circularity condition because he took them to be metalinguistic. Here I demonstrate that Kripke’s claim is false. Kripke’s comment makes it seem as if we have to choose between (1) and (2) – if we ought to mention the name ‘Willard’ here, then it’s a confusion to use it; and if we ought to use it, then it’s a confusion to mention it. But we don’t have to choose. Neither (1) nor (2) involves a use-mention confusion. Not only are both of (1) and (2) grammatical, they mean different things.