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On Location From Situating Semantics: Essays on the Philosophy of John Perry, ed. by Michael ORourke and
Corey Washington. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007, pp. 251393. Stephen Neale



On Location


Stephen Neale



1.UNDERARTICULATION

In Smith v. United States (1993), the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision
that resolved a conflict among the Circuit Courts over the interpretation of the common word
use as it occurs in the phrase use a firearm. This was for purposes of the provisions of a
statute setting penalties for offences where a defendant during and in relation to any crime
of violence or drug trafficking uses or carries a firearm.
1
The statute, 18 U.S.C. § 924(c)(1),
mandates a five-year consecutive sentence, increased to thirty years if the weapon is equipped
with a firearm silencer or firearm muffler.
Petitioner John Angus Smith had attempted to trade an unloaded automatic weapon, a
MAC-10, together with a silencer, for two ounces of cocaine, and had been found guilty of
drug trafficking. At no time did Smith brandish the weapon or threaten with it. The Supreme
Court ruled that the exchange or barter of a gun for illegal drugs constitutes use of a firearm,
thus agreeing with the opinion of the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit that the plain
language of the statute imposes no requirement that the firearm be used as a weapon and
disagreeing with the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that trading a firearm for drugs
could not itself constitute use of that firearm during and in relation to a crime.
2
According to
the Supreme Court, any use of the weapon to facilitate in any way the commission of the
offence was sufficient. In consequence, Smith had certainly used a firearm in a drug
trafficking crime by attempting to trade it, and it made no difference that he had not used it
in the way firearms are intended or designed to be used.
Interestingly, given my concerns here, the Court noted that the phrase as a weapon
appeared nowhere in the statute and wrote in its opinion, Had Congress intended the narrow
It is an honour to contribute a piece to this volume celebrating the work of my dissertation adviser
John Perry. Most of the paper was written at the University of Iceland in 2002/03 while I held a
fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. The first half was revised considerably in
2004 in the light of a seminar John Hawthorne and I taught on contextualism at Rutgers University.
Discussions in Reykjavík with Donald Davidson, Ólafur Páll Jónsson, Mikael Karlsson, Jón Ólafsson,
Ken Safir, and Höskuldur Þráinsson were extremely helpful. So were discussions with Kent Bach,
Emma Borg, and especially Robyn Carston and Ken Taylor in October 2002 at a conference in Genoa,
where a slice of the material was presented. So too were discussions with Eliza Block, Deniz Dagci,
Kevan Edwards, John Hawthorne, Damon Horowitz, Angel Pinillos, Adam Sennet, Ted Sider, Robert
Stainton, in the Autumn of 2004. John MacFarlane, Michael ORourke, Adam Sennet, Jason Stanley
provided me with some useful late comments that helped me fix a few problematic paragraphs. Several
works published in 2002 or laterBreheny (2002), Carston (2002), MacFarlane (2003, forthcoming),
Stanley (2002a, 2002b)are discussed only in footnotes added or expanded in 2004/2005.
Reorganization and rewritingbut I think no change in my positionwould have been necessary to
address in the text points raised in or by these interesting works, so footnotes must suffice. I gratefully
acknowledge the generous support of Rutgers University, the University of Iceland, and the John Simon
Guggenheim Foundation.
2
construction petitioner urges, it could have so indicated. It did not, and we decline to introduce
that additional requirement on our own. The Court continued,

It is one thing to say the ordinary meaning of using a firearm includes using a firearm as
a weapon, since it is the intended purpose of a firearm and the example of use that most
immediately comes to mind. But it is quite another to conclude that, as a result, the phrase
also excludes any other use. Certainly that conclusion does not follow from the phrase
uses . . . a firearm itself. . . . That one example of use is the first to come to mind when
the phrase uses . . . a firearm is uttered does not preclude us from recognizing that there
are other uses that qualify as well. In this case, it is both reasonable and normal to say that
petitioner used his MAC-10 in his drug trafficking offense by trading it for cocaine . . .
the only question in this case is whether the phrase uses . . . a firearm in § 924(c)(1) is
most reasonably read as excluding the use of a firearm in a gun-for-drugs trade. The fact
that the phrase clearly includes using a firearm to shoot someone, as the dissent contends,
does not answer it. . . . We are not persuaded that our construction of the phrase uses . . . a
firearm will produce anomalous applications . . . § 924(c)(1) requires not only that the
defendant use the firearm but also that he use it during and in relation to the drug
trafficking crime. As result, the defendant who uses a firearm to scratch his head . . . or
for some other innocuous purpose, would avoid punishment for that offense altogether:
Although scratching ones head with a gun might constitute use, that action cannot
support punishment under § 924(c)(1) unless it facilitates or furthers the crime; that the
firearm served to relieve an itch is not enough. . . . Under the dissents approach, . . . even
the criminal who pistol-whips his victim has not used a firearm within the meaning of §
924(c)(1), for firearms are intended to be fired or brandished, not used as bludgeons.


The central issue here is one which falls squarely within the purview of the philosophy of
language. It concerns whether the expression uses a firearm is to be understood, in the
context of this particular statute (and presumably elsewhere) as if it were tantamount to uses a
firearm as a weapon. The Court ruled that it should not. The issue may be set out in at least
three ways: (i) In terms of what many philosophers discussing attributive uses of incomplete
definite descriptions (the murderer, the mayor, and so on) have called ellipsis (not to be
confused with a syntactic notion in generative grammar often called ellipsis, deletion or
elision).
3
(ii) In terms of what Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson have called the
underdetermination of propositions by the meanings of the linguistic forms we use to express
them (even relative to assignments of referents to singular terms and the specification of any
anaphoric links).
4
Or (iii) in terms of what John Perry has called unarticulated constituents of
the propositions we express using sentences of natural language.
5
We are in the same territory
with the concepts mentioned in (i)-(iii), although (a) Perrys conception of unarticulated
constituents appears to involve subtleties relevant to the study of thought that elude simple
talk of ellipsis and underdetermination; (b) talk of underdetermination appears to involve
subtleties and allow for interpretive possibilities not obviously captured by talk of ellipsis and
unarticulated constituents. I do not, however, want to get too embroiled in these matters here.
If we want a label that is neutral, we could do worse than talk about underarticulation, but we
shall have to be careful at times:

The Underarticulation Thesis (UT): What a speaker says (the proposition he expresses)
by uttering an unambiguous, declarative sentence on given occasion is underarticulated
by s syntax, the meanings of the morphemes in , the prosodic features of , the
references to any referring expressions in (including those of an indexical nature), and
the specifications of all anaphoric links.


3
Several things about this general characterization should be mentioned. (1) I assume here and
throughout the standard view that propositions are true or false without relativization to times
(or anything else).
6
And in order to engage with Perry and other authors, I shall assume that
propositions have objects, properties, and complexes built out of such things as constituents.
Thus the proposition that Scalia judges has Scalia himself and the property of judging as
constituents. (2) I talk of the proposition a speaker expresses. This is because I follow
Austin, Grice and Strawson in construing meaning, saying, asking, implying, referring,
predicating, asserting, making statements, and expressing propositions as things people do on
given occasions (usually with words), as intentional actions they perform.
7
(3) For simplicity, I
shall start out using indexical in its broad sense above to include any expression that may be
used to refer to different things on different occasions of utterance, for example the words I,
you, he, this, that, here, there, now, and then.
8
(4) By anaphoric links, I mean
(rou