Dogwhistles: Persona and Ideology

Abstract

A dogwhistle is a piece of language that sends one message to an out- group while at the same time sending a second (often taboo, controversial, or in- flammatory) message to an ingroup. We propose an analysis of dogwhistles in the setting of social meaning games that treats them as signaling the persona of the speaker, and in some circumstances enabling an enrichment of the conventional meaning of the expression through the connections of social personas and ideolo- gies, which we model formally. We show that this account improves over pitfalls encountered in other accounts (Henderson & McCready 2019b; Khoo 2017; Stanley 2015), which includes in some of our own previous work. We further show how this formal framework allows, not just a account of dogwhistles, but opens up a way to analyze a variety of sociopragmatic phenomena like unconscious bias and epistemic hypervigilance.