Abstract
Political communication in modern democratic societies often requires the speaker to address multiple audiences with heterogeneous values, interests and agendas. This creates an incentive for communication strategies that allow politicians to send, along with the explicit content of their speech, concealed messages that seek to secure the approval of certain groups without alienating the rest of the electorate. These strategies have been labeled dogwhistling in recent literature. In this article, we provide an analysis of overt intentional dogwhistling (OID). We recognize two main stages within the OIDs’ way of conveying a concealed message: the expression of a perspective together with the transmission of an accompanying positioning message vis-à-vis the OID targeted sub-audience, and the inferential extraction (by the target audience) of a set of cognitive and non-cognitive contents inferred on the basis of the former stage. Furthermore, we identify three linguistic mechanisms whereby these contents may be transmitted: conventional meaning, conversational implicature and perlocutionary inferencing. Hence, on our view OIDs are not a uniform category, as they may differ as to what extent the concealed content is speaker-meant, and thus actually communicated by the speaker.
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Notes
Although it is usual, in discussing dogwhistles, to talk about speakers sending coded messages to part of the audience, and of dogwhistles as being code words, we eschew code-talk, as it gives the impression that dogwhistles work by way of encoding, whereas we argue that they may be either conventional or non-conventional. Hence, we choose conceal-talk, in order to capture both the implicitness of what is dogwhistled, and the varied means by which dogwhistles work.
Jill Stein, interview during a Reddit AMA session, 2016. https://amatranscripts.com/ama/jill_stein_2016-05-11.html. Discussed in Henderson and McCready (2019).
George W. Bush, presidential debate, October 8, 2004. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/debatereferee/debate_1008.html.
George W. Bush, State of the Union speech, 2003. Discussed in Saul (2018).
We should note that the term ‘big pharma’ signals a broader view which includes an attitude of disapproval towards the lobby of big pharmaceutical companies or the endorsement of “alternative medicine.” Often, a general distrust concerning the efficacy of vaccines and an opposition to mandatory vaccination accompanies these commitments, but not necessarily (see, for example, Henderson and McCready, 2019, p. 229). We will use the label ‘anti-vaxxer’ for this variable and vaguely defined bundle of views.
The main covert intentional dogwhistle discussed in the literature is the racially loaded Willie Horton ad for George H. W. Bush campaign against Michael Dukakis (see Mendelberg 2001).
They differ, of course, as to the mechanisms they posit. Thus, Saul (2018) takes up Camp’s (2018) analysis of insinuation as a model for OIDs, Henderson and McCready (2019) appeal to Burnett ’s (2017, 2019) ideas on Bayesian signaling games, and Khoo (2017) offers an inference-driven account of those same examples.
Thanks are due to an anonymous reviewer for Synthese for drawing this point to our attention.
The hymn in question is “There is power in the blood.” See https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2003-03-02-0303020289-story.html for an interpretation along these lines.
We are indebted to an anonymous referee for Synthese for pointing out the importance of figleaves to the understanding of dogwhistles.
Figleaves may also be offered for non-racist discriminatory remarks, as in:
I have nothing against homosexuals, but...
So, we may think of figleaves in general as moves whose function is to cast doubt on the speaker’s bigotry, thereby casting doubt upon the discriminatory nature of explicitly discriminatory remarks, thus leading to an eventual change in the boundaries of what is permissible to say and do, in view of certain general norm of non-discrimination.
This is but a linguistic analogue of Grice’s photograph example (Grice , 1957), aimed at showing that intention recognition must play a central response-eliciting role for there to be communication.
This distinguishes perlocutionary inferences form conversational implicatures, where the full Gricean intentional structure is present.
Our point that perlocutionary inferences will take place whether or not the audience recognizes the speaker’s intentions should not be confused with the claim that these inferences are mandatory. Unlike some types of conventionally triggered inferences, such as conventional implicatures, perlocutionary inferences are optional and context-driven.
Regarding this possibility, see Egan (2009).
We are indebted to a reviewer for Synthese for suggesting thinking about this in Lewisian terms.
As an aside, Saul’s particular account of the Dred Scott example as a case of conversational implicature where the speaker seeks to flout a conversational maxim (see Saul , 2018, p. 363) does not work, for as we will see in Sect. 3.7, it is crucial for the success of the OID that its naive interpretation makes more or less sense, in the context, for the general audience.
We assume here, following the Fregean semantic tradition, that semantics comprehends only conventional dimensions of meaning.
In addition to observed patterns of use, the association between the perspective and the construction may be underpinned by the belief that the expression is used by speakers who hold the perspective.
Part, for example, of the unspecified class of procédés accessoires that Benveniste (1980) identifies in his discussion of the formal apparatus of enunciation.
A comparison with non-doxastic effects like fear my be instructive. A horror film may be intended by its creators to elicit fear in the audience. They may have sound hypotheses concerning how best to achieve this effect, and may expect part of the potential audience to experience fear in watching the film. All of this notwithstanding, whether the audience feels fear or not, does not depend on any recognition of any intention to induce fear by means of the film.
Boyd describes the case of Carmen, a teenager wanting to get through to her friends, via Facebook, the message that she was not feeling well (due to having broken up with her boyfriend), without her mother noticing (thus avoiding a potential overreaction on her part). She decided to post the lyrics from Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” an innocent enough post by her mother’s lights, yet capable of alerting Carmen’s friends that something was wrong. The example is available at https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/08/23/social-steganography-learning-to-hide-in-plain-sight.html.
Witten (2008) has a very interesting account of how the common ground of the different communities of practice that may constitute an OID audience may be exploited by the speaker in order to issue an OID directed at them. We find her explanation in consonance with our view of this kind of OID. We differ in that directionality for other kinds of OIDs cannot be explained in this way.
As Witten (2008) suggests, the OID audience is usually a strongly unified group, in terms of assumptions, interests, etc. Most of the time, they will belong to a determinate community of practice. This is usually enough to presuppose a set of common and shared assumptions among the members of the OID, in virtue of belonging to such a group.
Thanks to two anonymous reviewers for Synthese for raising this issue.
Mazzarella understands relevance in terms of Relevance Theory, so the plausibility of a denial depends, on her view, on the cognitive effort needed to process the new set of contextual assumptions vis-à-vis the effort needed to process the old one, and the cognitive effects of the reconstruction of the utterance vis-à-vis the cognitive effects of the original one. However, in principle the same idea could be reformulated in terms of a classical Gricean framework, as we do below.
We are indebted to an anonymous reviewer for Synthese, for pressing us on this issue.
Roughly put, within this framework messages have, in addition to their standard denotational meaning, a social meaning which signals a set of possible personae. Thus, in choosing a given message the speaker aims at restricting the possible personae the hearer can assign to her when interpreting the utterance. Speaker and listener choose their message and interpretation with the goal of maximizing the expected utility of the utterance, which is calculated by taking into account both the amount of information conveyed about the speaker’s persona and the affective values assigned to the personae consistent with the message.
Paul Ryan, interview in Bill Bennett’s Morning in America, March 12, 2014.
As discussed in Sect. 3.4.1, our view differs from Henderson and McCready’s in that they reject a ‘two dialects’ view as the one we proposed to account for (2).
It is worth noting that (Burnett , 2019, Sec. 2) explicitly treats inferences triggered by socially meaningful expressions as some kind of conversational implicature. Henderson and McCready adopt Burnett’s view, but since they are not explicit about this particular feature of the framework, we assume that their view is just silent on the topic. If they fully adopted Burnett’s views, their approach would be incompatible with ours, since we treat some OIDs in terms of perlocutionary inferences, and some as conventional.
Actually, Khoo draws a parallel between the beliefs arrived at by the target audience and the beliefs arrived at by an addressee by noticing, e.g. that the speaker has a particular accent. There is some ambivalence in this characterization, for this parallelism seems to deprive dogwhistles of any intentionality whatsoever, insofar as there is no intentionality in speaking with an accent.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the people in the BA-LingPhil and the BA-Logic groups for their insightful suggestions and comments on previous versions of this article, Diana Mazzarella for sharing her (then unpublished) work with us, and Kim Witten for allowing us to cite her unpublished contribution to the debate.
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Lo Guercio, N., Caso, R. An account of overt intentional dogwhistling. Synthese 200, 203 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03511-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03511-6