Re: Reification and use/mention

>(Personally I like Jeremy's view, anyway...)
>
>Can someone tell me which of these are using, and which mentioning, 'Jan'?

I put quotes in as it is rather hard to *use* a person as a symbol to 
refer to something else, particularly when he is on a different 
continent.

>The subject of the sentence is "Jan".

That uses the quoted expression '"Jan" ' (ie the expression 
quote-J-a-n-quote, 5 characters) to refer to, ie to mention, the word 
'Jan'; it talks about the word, not the person. (That's why one uses 
quotes.) So this mentions 'Jan'.

>The sentence is about Jan.

That uses the word 'Jan' to mention Jan, the person. This is the 
usual way that words are used. So this uses 'Jan'.

In the above text, every expression is being used; if the expression 
is a quotation, then it is used to mention - refer to - the 
expression inside the quotes. Notice that an expression is never used 
to refer to itself.

>Seems current reification behaves like the latter; is there anything
>wrong with this?

Nothing wrong, no.  But that isn't what the M&S says, so we ought to 
get this clear.

BTW, how do we even know what current reification *behaves* like? 
Where in the current RDF spec is any behavior of reification 
specified?

>jan
>
>* Insert quotes as appropriate.

I did.

Pat
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Received on Thursday, 8 November 2001 20:13:41 UTC