Dogwhistles as Identity-based interpretative variation (2020)

Abstract: The following paper presents a formal model for the description of dogwhistles . Dogwhistles are a class of terms or expressions often used in political discourse that are used with the goal of being interpreted in different ways by different communities. The model presented here describes this phenomenon using a variation on the Social Meaning Games framework that uses probability distributions over possible interpretation functions as well as RSA/IBR reasoning.

## introduction pragmatics has underlined the importance of context in determining the meaning of utterances, and gricean pragmatics in particular has established a normative framework for the successful transmission of a message between two cooperating agents @xcite . the insights into human communication that are grice's conversational maxims have led to formal implementations since @xcite . most notably, the maxim of quality is the basis for the emergence of scalar implicatures in the rational speech act (rsa) framework @xcite . grice's maxims, much like lewis' signalling games, only seek to describe situations where language is used for the sole goal of transmitting accurate information from one speaker to a listener. this is in part what is meant by "cooperation": both sides share the same goal of having the information properly transmitted (whether it be by choosing the right message for the speaker, or choosing the right interpretation for the listener). this vision, however, only describes a subset of language. it is reasonable, for example, to think that the information content of a linguistic utterance is not limited to the content of the message itself, but that the way in which the message is articulated, either in terms of pronunciation or choice of words, can convey information about the speaker themself. this is what sociolinguists call social meaning @xcite : the part of a linguistic signal that conveys information about the person producing the signal rather than the content of the signal itself. it has been shown that intuitions about the social meaning contained in certain accents, for example, has an influence on the reception of a message by the listeners, leading to systematic interpretations of signals that could be at odds with the message conveyed by the content of the message @xcite . the traditional approach is limited in its scope in the sense that it fails to account for the existence of at least two sources of what could be called "information" in any given linguistic utterance: message content and social meaning. works on social meaning games (smg) @xcite fill this gap by offering a framework based on game theory (like lewis' works and like many formal approaches to pragmatics, including rsa) which treats socially significant linguistic variation as another source of meaning. this leads to a variation on signaling games in which the personae signaled by the speaker and retrieved by the listener have to match in order to maximize both players' utilities. crucially, we are talking of personae, not social identity, because we have to account for cases where the speaker is trying to convey a specific set of traits about themself to the listener for a given goal; they are trying to communicate how they want to be seen in this situation. here, we are reaching a point where the maxim of quality is, to some extent, flouted, or at least not as relevant. examples used for the illustration of smgs in burnett 2019 are often political in nature. political discourse (whether in debates or speeches) is a great field of inquiry for these phenomena because they involve speakers that are publicly known and for whom we can usually access several discourses, including discourses in many different contexts. smgs can give us an intuitive view of how social meaning is conveyed, which is key in understanding political discourse, but they fail to account for situations described as dogwhistle politics. the term dogwhistle refers to a class of expressions often used in political discourse; the goal in using them is to convey two different messages to two different communities. smgs do not take into account the fact that the audience of a political discourse might be ideologically heterogeneous, leading to differing interpretations of a given message according to prior beliefs and social background. the goal of this work is to define what form situations of dogwhistling might take and to give a formal model describing the contexts in which they are more likely to be used. ## dogwhistles and dogwhistle politics dogwhistle politics is generally defined as sending a message to an audience in such a way that a subset of the audience will understand the message differently from the rest of the audience. in more political terms, it is a "way of sending a message to certain potential supporters in such a way as to make it inaudible to others whom it might alienate or deniable for still others who would find any explicit appeal along those lines offensive" @xcite . to what extent are such practices indeed noticed and what effects do they actually have on public opinion? there is a compelling literature on the subject, showing notably that phrases like "inner cities" can be responsible for the fact that discussions of nonracial policies can be biased by racial thinking in white voters @xcite while having a different effect on black voters @xcite . likewise, it has been shown that the use of religious discourse can also have a significant impact on both opinions and voting intentions for evangelical voters @xcite . the effects of dogwhistle speech are backed by empirical evidence and these effects are congruent with the effects that are intuitively attached to the practice: dogwhistle speech reinforces the support of core supporters while being ignored by moderates, in situations where explicit reference to religion or race has negative effects on moderates. as far as the intentional use of such terms is concerned, we can mention @xcite , who clearly acknowledges it: "we threw in a few obscure turns of phrase known clearly to any evangelical, yet unlikely to be noticed by anyone else [. . . ]" the topic, however, has barely been discussed in the linguistics literature. several theories exist regarding how and why dogwhistles actually work and only recently (starting with stanley 2015) have these efforts focused on analyzing the language per se and trying to give a linguistically consistent description of the phenomenon. a first approach consists in saying that dogwhistle words have an explicit meaning and an implicit meaning. this is the approach favored by mendelberg 2001; stanley 2015; henderson and mccready 2019b and saul 2018. one way of thinking about this (mendelberg, 2001 ) is ambiguity, each word would have several meanings, for example one racial and the other nonracial, and the use of that term would trigger (or not) one or both of the interpretations in the audience. this makes intuitive sense, but it has important problems, one of them being that the ambiguity that takes place here does not appear to be symmetrical. khoo 2017 uses the counterexample of the ambiguous word "funny" in english, which can either mean "humorous" or "strange", and remarks that (1) poses no problem. smith is a funny man who is not humorous. compare with a sentence like (2), which sounds very uncanny. if the word "inner-city" was indeed ambiguous between a racial and a nonracial meaning, one should be able to cancel out one of the two meanings, but it appears that the nonracial meaning is not cancellable, whereas (3) does not seem to cause any weirdness in terms of interpretation. if the word "inner-city" was properly ambiguous, one would call upon either one of its meanings while disregarding, or even cancelling the other, and this does not appear to be the case. stanley 2015 proposes an approach relying on the concepts of at-issue and not-at-issue contents. the idea here is that dogwhistle words would not be ambiguous per se, but that through con-ventional use, they have acquired a secondary, not-at-issue meaning. the problem with this approach, however, is underlined in @xcite @xcite conventional meanings are generally thought to be noncancellable, which makes the crucial deniability part of dogwhistles impossible. compare, for example, with slurs, where the added conventional meaning that gives the listener information about the speaker's attitude towards the community they are referring to is not cancellable (examples from ( henderson and mccready, 2019b) ), compare (4) with (5), where "welfare" is thought to dogwhistle a negative attitude towards social programs: (4) a: angela merkel is a kraut! b: what do you have against germans? a: #i don't have anything against germans. why do you think i might? (5) a: donald is on welfare. b: what do you have against social programs? a: i don't have anything against social programs. why do you think i might? that deniability is a key point of dogwhistles that differentiates them from slurs or other lexical items imbued with added conventional meaning. ## formal model there have been very few attempts at sketching out a formal representation of dogwhistles and their use, and we argue that any attempt at doing so should present a solution that satisfies the following properties of the phenomenon: dogwhistles are cases of interpretative variabil-ity, where different listeners should assign different interpretations to a speaker's single utterance. dogwhistles are most common in situations of political conflict between conversational participants @xcite @xcite . furthermore, interpretative variability is identity-based: listeners who attribute a religious identity, or persona @xcite , similar to theirs to the speaker will be more likely to interpret the dogwhistle in the religious way than those who believe the speaker holds no specific religious beliefs @xcite . since racist interpretations are conditioned on but not determined by identity, use of a dogwhistle often provides some plausible deniability to the speaker, which can be use-ful to them to satisfy the political requirements of a diverse audience. this deniability is important because a savvy opponent, someone who does not share the speaker's political ideology but who understands the racist way the dogwhistle can be used, can call the speaker out for this use @xcite . finally, as observed by @xcite or not an expression will display identity-based interpretative variability depends on its specific form: expressions that are truth-conditionally equivalent to inner city, such as city center, are not semantically variable in the same way. ## 'inner cities' example by way of illustration, we will focus on the oftenused example of "inner cities". following (henderson and mccready, 2019a,b), let s be representative paul ryan trying to discuss issues in urban areas while also trying to gather the support of his more right-wing voters. let l i be a stand-in for a more conservative voter and l j a less conservative voter. more specifically, l j refuses to speak openly of race in that context and ryan would lose their support if he did, whereas l i would be more likely to offer their support to ryan if he did take into account race in his discourse. this is the perfect situation for a dogwhistle. here is the original statement by ryan: we have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work. let m be the set of expressions available to s. to simplify, we will distinguish between three possible messages: {"inner cities", "city centers", "african-american neighborhoods"}. these dif-fer by being more or less open references to race, with "city centers" ignoring race completely and "african-american neighborhoods" putting it front and center. "inner cities" is our dogwhistle term. because of those properties, we will label these messages as follows: @xmath0, m ¬r , m r } to this we add the set w of worlds, which distinguishes between worlds where the issue is about race and worlds where it is not: let pers contain the possible personae of "racist conservative" and "non-racist conservative" : @xmath1, π j } finally, we also set the following : there are two interpretation functions, one corresponding to each of the personae we are considering here. for simplicity, we assume that for any persona π ρ , our listeners will associate it invariably with the corresponding interpretation function, meaning that they assume that people displaying persona π ρ will always mean m ρ . the probability distribution over worlds is uniform, meaning that people have no priors regarding what is going to be said. see the important value we want to have here are the probabilities ascribed to the interpretation of each message p l i/j (w|m) for each listener, as well as the p s (m|w) score for each message of what the speaker is expected to say given that they wish to communicate w. after the relevant computations, applying the µ functions in what we can see with these numbers is that honest listeners believe that honest speakers would be more likely to use m r if they wish to convey w r , but that using m d is not seen as impossible. similarly for m ¬r and w ¬r . what it also shows, however, is that if they hear m d , they are more likely to interpret it according to the interpretation function that they deemed more probable, given their prior beliefs about the speaker. we can use ( 12 ) and ( 13 ) to have a better idea of the behavior of the speaker. in this case, we obtain that p i s (m d ) ≈ 0.351 and p j s ≈ 0.271, so the use of m d will be somewhat unexpected, but still more or less in keeping with the idea of such a speaker. we now consider the duplicitous speaker s dup , who uses the literal listener values along with the µ * function presented in a savvy listener l savvy in this framework is simply a listener who assumes the duplicity of the speaker and bases their interpretation of the speaker message using p s dup instead of p s . to compute the intention of the speaker, l savvy uses the p w values used at the previous step by the duplicitous listener, following (16) leading to the numbers in we argue that our model accounts for the main properties of dogwhistles in the following ways: ## conclusion we have constructed a model that allows us to describe the processes behind the use of dogwhistles by using mechanisms that are already widely used in pragmatics to describe scalar implicatures and social meaning interpretation. we have assumed that a group of more "naïve" listeners use regular rsa-style computations to infer the probable meaning of a dogwhistles utterance while still taking into account the fact that the words used could have different meanings for other audiences. duplicitous speakers willing to convey two different messages to audiences with different preferences and biases will use dogwhistles to do so and it is likely that they will be understood in the way they intended given what they were assuming of the crowd. meanwhile, savvy listeners assume that speakers are indeed duplicitous and conclude that the most likely interpretation after hearing a dogwhistle term is that the speaker is trying to appeal to two different audiences. following a similar path and adding iterations in the reasoning, we could easily model other roles in the dogwhistling game, including for example speakers who use dogwhistles in order to specifically trigger savvy listener reactions and then defend themselves from accusations of duplicity by calling out savvy listeners for ad hominem/appeal to motive positions. we think that the framework used here could be generalized to other cases of identity-based interpretation, including cases outside the realm of political discourse, where the meaning intended by speakers is sometimes vague enough to trigger various interpretations from listeners.