In his paper “Quotation”, Donald Davidson contrasts three theories about how quotation marks do their work, that is, about how tokens like this one: "sheep” refer to the type of which the following is a token: sheep. He rejects the “proper name” and “spelling” theories, and propounds and defends a new account of quotation which he calls the “demonstrative theory”. I shall argue that the truth about how quotation works has points of resemblance with both the spelling and demonstrative theories, (...) though it is not a mere combination of elements from those two. It is closer to Davidson’s theory than to the other, and I have reached it by developing the pioneering start that he provided. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to uncover and correct several confusions about expressions, tokens and the relations between them that crop up in even highly sophisticated writing about language and logic.