An account of Overt intentional dogwhistling

LO GUERCIO, NICOLÁS FRANCISCO; CASO, RAMIRO

Barcelona

Seminario; Reading group on The Philosophy of Hybrid Representations; 2023

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. Inthis article, we provide an analysis of overt intentional dogwhistling (OID). We recognize two main stages within OIDs’ way of conveying a concealed message: the expression of a perspective together with the transmission of an accompanying positioning message vis-`a-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 regards to what extent the concealed contentis speaker-meant, and thus actually communicated by the speaker.