Dogwhistles: Ideology and Trust

Abstract

In political speech, it is often strategically important to signal one's ideology to a subset of listeners, especially when that ideology may be controversial. The term "dogwhistle" refers to a kind of coded message sent which sends one message to all listeners and an additional message to a class of `savvy' interpreters; this kind of messaging is prevalent in political discourse. This talk describes an approach to dogwhistles which takes them to send coded messages in a way dependent on recognition of the speaker's political ideology. After laying out some criteria for an account of dogwhistles, a game-theoretic account is proposed and then extended to a general notion of communicative trust.