Language Log: The Supreme Court Fails Semantics All that the Court actually argues is that "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS" contains a reference to drug use.

Gibberish is surely a possible interpretation of the words on the banner, but it is not the only one, and dismissing the banner as meaningless ignores its undeniable reference to illegal drugs. [emphasis mine]

That is probably true, but a reference is not a proposition and does not support any inference as to the speaker’s attitude toward smoking marijuana. Even if the banner said “smoking marijuana” we could not say whether it meant “Smoking marijuana is hazardous.” or “Smoking marijuana is delightful.” or something else.

In sum, from the observation that the banner contains a reference to smoking marijuana, and the false assumption that the banner must express a proposition, the Court has invalidly inferred a particular proposition. The slogan is in fact meaningless in the sense that it expresses no proposition, and Frederick gave a perfectly plausible explanation for the use of a meaningless slogan. The Court was therefore wrong in finding that the banner advocates the use of marijuana.

This is as good a reason for finding some branches of modern linguistics to be at a dead end as any. Now, I’m all for legalizing marijuana (even though I’ve never tried it), and I’m not a big fan of the US Supreme Court’s recent right-wing turn, but this argument based on the Supreme Court’s assumed transgression against ‘semantics’ is completely spurious. It relies on semantics being devoid of any context and understanding. True, ‘Bong hits 4 Jesus’ doesn’t say that people should do it but in the context, it is a clear anti-establishment message with its associated frames of freedom to choose and altered minds. For anybody to argue that that is not how the message would be read by a majority of readers and that the author (no matter what is true intentions) did not understand that that’s how the message would be read is simply to ignore how meaning making in natural language occurs.

What is interesting about this is that a complete syntactic and semantic  parsing of the message is not necessary. The meaning and structure of the sentence are underdetermined which contributes to its various speech act forces. All sorts of arguments can be made for not suppressing the message but one based on its being ambiguous, seems to me, to be the least fruitful.