An account of overt intentional dogwhistling

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.

The Definition and Typological Model of a Dogwhistle

“…This is also the case when speakers may unintentionally repeat dogwhistle messages and are unaware that they are doing so. Saul (2018a) and others (Lo Guercio & Caso, 2022) subcategorize these as 'unintentional dogwhistles'; see Discussion for more on this.…”

“…Since one of the fundamental components of a dogwhistle is plausible deniability (Fear, 2007;Torices, 2021;Lo Guercio & Caso, 2022) and the intent to send a coded message cannot be proven, the very nature of the dogwhistling tactic allows the speaker to deny the existence of a secondary meaning contained in a message sent to their audience(s). This is done on the grounds that what was interpreted by some was not what was intended by the speaker.…”

Dogwhistling as a narrative-evoking form of communication

“…For them, any context of utterance gets updated with the assumptions and norms that were in force in the memory context, namely, that in which the narrative prevailed. A slightly more complex example is the one, largely quoted in the philosophical and political science reflection on dogwhistles (Khoo 2017, Saul 2018, Henderson and McCready 2019, Lo Guercio and Caso 2022, featuring a sentence included in the speech given by George W. Bush during the campaign for the 2004 presidential election in the USA:…”

“…Another fragment of Bush's political speech, also profusely quoted by many philosophers (Khoo 2017, Saul 2018, Henderson and McCready 2019, Lo Guercio and Caso 2022, may be analyzed along similar lines. In the presidential debate held during the same political campaign, when asked about what kind of judge he would appoint for the Supreme Court (if there were a vacancy), he replied:…”

“…One of the characteristics of the covert message, mentioned by different authors(Saul 2018, Lo Guercio andCaso 2022), is that its content is underdetermined.…”