Signaling Without Saying: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Dogwhistles

Signaling without Saying develops game-theoretic approaches to social meaning to model the phenomenon of dogwhistles, perhaps best known from political speech. These constructions involve language that sends one message to an out-group while at the same time sending a second-often taboo, controversial, or inflammatory-message to an in-group. Robert Henderson and Elin McCready show that dogwhistles should not be modeled in the same way as related language, like slurs, and nor should they be treated via standard Gricean implicatures computed over truth-conditional meaning; instead, they should be treated as primarily bearing social meaning, as understood by modern variationist sociolinguistic theories.

The book identifies and models two different kinds of dogwhistle meaning, while also exploring a variety of related phenomena. The authors show how novel implicatures in the social meaning domain can arise when a listener detects a dogwhistle, and connect them to implicatures familiar in the truth-conditional domain. Social meaning, they argue, can be added to theories of trust in testimonial evidence, and dogwhistles can help to establish trust with an audience, even when expressing false propositions. The final chapter of the book looks at connections between dogwhistles and other issues important in epistemology and philosophy of language which might involve social meaning, such as standpoint theory.

Robert Henderson, Associate Professor of Linguistics, University of Arizona, Elin McCready, Professor, Department of English, Aoyama Gakuin University

Robert Henderson is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. His research is in formal semantics and pragmatics with a special focus on the indigenous languages of Mesoamerica, especially Mayan languages, which he has studied through many years of fieldwork. His theoretical work focuses on plurality, quantification, and the structure of discourse, along with the logics needed to model those systems in human languages.

Elin McCready is Professor of Linguistics at Aoyama Gakuin University. Her main area of research is formal semantics and pragmatics, with secondary interests in epistemology, game theory, and feminist philosophy. She is the author of the OUP volumes Reliability in Pragmatics (2015) and The Semantics and Pragmatics of Honorification (2019), and co-editor of Epistemology for the Rest of the World (with Stephen Stich and Masaharu Mizumoto; 2018).