Does “‘Quotation’” Quote “Quotation”?

Getting a precise and accurate understanding of the mechanism of quotation is broadly important to contemporary philosophy, impacting on numerous research areas, and it’s deeply important, being foundational to truth-theoretic semantics (Saka 1998, 1991). It is gratifying, therefore, to see an upsurge in quotation studies that includes at least nine doctoral dissertations in the past fifteen years, a recent volume of Protosociology devoted to the semantics of discourse reports (2002), multiple anthologies, and several monographs. It is particularly gratifying to have this lively compact monograph by Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore (henceforth C&L), and to have it available now in paperback. With their usual flair C&L explain why we should study quotation; they lay out the leading issues in the literature; they criticize prior theories, including the demonstrative theory they are so well known for; they introduce a new version of the identity-function theory; and they offer a valuable essay on an unduly neglected topic in philosophy of language, that of the metaphysics of signs. (The book thus repudiates C&L 2005a, brings together the material found in C&L 2005b and 2006, and foreshadows Hawthorne & Lepore 2011 and Johnson & Lepore 2011.) It is C&L’s positive theory, as developed in chapter 11, that I will focus on. Its centerpiece is the following disquotational quotation schema QS: