Abstract
Dog whistling—speech that seems ordinary but sends a hidden, often derogatory message to a subset of the audience—is troubling not just for our political ideals, but also for our theories of communication. On the one hand, it seems possible to dog whistle unintentionally, merely by uttering certain expressions. On the other hand, the intention is typically assumed or even inferred from the act, and perhaps for good reason, for dog whistles seem misleading by design, not just by chance. In this paper, I argue that, to understand when and why it’s possible to dog-whistle unintentionally (and indeed, intentionally), we’ll need to recognize the structure of our linguistic practices. For dog whistles and for covertly coded speech more generally, this structure is a pair of practices, one shared by all competent speakers and the other known only to some, but deployable in the same contexts. In trying to identify these enabling conditions, we’ll discover what existing theories of communicated content overlook by focusing on particular utterances in isolation, or on individual speakers’ mental states. The remedy, I argue, lies in attending to the ways in which what is said is shaped by the temporally extended, socio-politically structured linguistic practices that utterances instantiate.
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Notes
Though the philosophical literature specifically concerned with dog-whistle speech is recent, the topic has already received rather diverse treatments. Focusing on liberal democratic norms of public discourse, Stanley (2015) describes dog-whistle speech as a propagandistic mechanism which serves to surreptitiously erode those norms, even while appearing to conform to them. Khoo (2017), on the other hand, considers whether dog whistles’ in-group messages are a semantic or pragmatic phenomenon, and argues that they are pragmatic results of hearers’ inferences. Saul (2018) distinguishes between dog whistles which the in-group recognize as such and dog whistles which raise certain attitudes to salience without the awareness of those affected. Saul theorizes the latter as a type of perlocutionary speech act which succeeds only when the audience is not aware of the speaker’s intention to dog whistle. The linguists Robert Henderson and Elin McCready (2019) incorporate aspects of social meaning into Khoo’s inferentialist treatment. While political scientists have studied racial codes since at least the early 1980s, the work that’s proved most influential for this recent philosophical literature has been Mendelberg (2001), who argues that dog whistles arise when contradictory social norms have been internalized. The legal scholar Haney López (2014) offers an indispensable historical understanding of dog whistles, tracing their use back to the post–Civil War Reconstruction era.
For example, during the 1968 campaign season, the Fair Campaign Practices Committee described “‘code words’ with racial implications” as their biggest concern, pointing to examples such as “law and order” and “crime in the streets.” United Press International, “New Racial Smears Held More Subtle,” New York Times, Sept. 18, 1968, 22.
I’ll say more about this notion of message in Sect. 3, but for now it’ll suffice to say that utterances sending the same message make the same kind of contribution to a discourse or serve the same discursive role, which might center on information, attitudes and emotions, or value judgements.
Another kind of example is social scientists studying such language, who have successfully produced such effects by asking survey participants questions about, for example, “inner city criminals.” At least in certain experimental designs, these effects can be produced by speakers who do not intend to communicate racist messages—for instance, in designs where the survey questions are administered by research assistants who are purposefully not fully informed about the effects that the study is designed to measure, so as to avoid introducing researcher bias. For more examples, see Haney López (2014), Hurwitz & Peffley (2005), Mendelberg (2001), and Smith (1987).
Here and below, I use “communicative intention” as a shorthand for “the message a speaker intends their audience to receive,” and not in the technical sense of Grice (1957), where the communicative intention is characteristically transparent to hearers, and mutually recognizable as such.
I’ll discuss a number of theorists who take such a practice-focused approach in Sect. 4.1.
For instance, Kripke’s (1982) influential interpretation of Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox posits a communal, pragmatist account of meaning in place of the individualist accounts (whether in terms of mental states or behavioral dispositions) that are found untenable.
Note that this definition of “coded” may diverge from our ordinary use of the term.
As I’ll clarify in more detail below, this category of “covertly coded speech” is distinct from what Saul (2018) calls “covert dogwhistling,” which is a sub-type of dog-whistle speech which goes unnoticed even by those whose attitudes are successfully affected or changed by hearing the dog whistle.
Constructing the category of covertly coded speech thus serves to foreground the linguistic and communicative aspects of dog-whistle speech, at the cost of backgrounding (at least in the span of this paper) its social, political, and moral aspects. Although I think these aspects deserve careful philosophical study, I won’t be able to do them justice in the space of this work.
For a thorough account of the ad’s creation and reception, see Mendelberg (2001), 135–165. Saul (2018, pp. 365–66) analyzes the Horton ad as one instance of what she calls a covert dogwhistle—i.e., a dogwhistle which influences some hearers’ reasoning or behavior without their conscious awareness. Note that my use of “covert” differs from Saul’s. I say more about this difference in Sect. 4 below.
As an anonymous reviewer rightly pointed out, it’s often more difficult to identify the relevant enabling practices for something like a TV ad, than for utterances of linguistic expressions. Though this paper focuses on linguistic expressions, the central proposal in principle extends to non-linguistic cases too. I’ll give the practice-focused account of this example in Sect. 3.2 below.
For an illuminating discussion of an even wider variety of linguistic and visual dog whistles, see Saul and Drainville (forthcoming), who draw examples from advertising, art, memes, and hand signals, to name but a few.
“The Guardian view on Rashford, Sancho and Saka: let down by dog whistles from Downing Street,” The Guardian, July 12, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/12/the-guardian-view-on-rashford-sancho-and-saka-let-down-by-dog-whistles-from-downing-street. Thanks to Ian Proops for bringing this example to my attention.
Marci Robin, “The Internet Is Comparing Melania Trump’s Outfit to a Famous Fictional Nazi,” Allure, Oct. 8, 2018, https://www.allure.com/story/melania-trump-africa-outfit-looks-like-nazi-sympathizer.
Granted, this may not be the only way that a speaker could produce the kinds of effects that dog-whistle speech produces. But this is not unique to dog whistles or covert codes; our linguistic practices equip and even over-equip us in a variety of ways—consider, for example, the variety of synonyms or sentence structures a speaker might use to convey one and the same message.
That said, affective or evaluative framings could also be understood as semantic, even propositional, contents. Stanley (2015, pp. 125 − 77) weighs several ways we might extend existing semantic models to this broader variety of discursive effects.
Translation: “This is clearly coded.” In Pig Latin, initial consonant sounds are moved to the end of each word, and words beginning with vowel sounds are not changed. “Ay” is then appended to each word. In Caesar cypher or alphabet-shift encryption, each letter is replaced by one that is further down in alphabetical order by a set number of spaces. The expression “UIJT JT DMFBSMZ DPEFE” is encrypted by a shift of 1; i.e., by substituting each letter by its immediate follower, so that B replaces A, C replaces B, etc.
Dan Roberts and Ben Jacobs, “Donald Trump Proclaims Himself ‘Law and Order’ Candidate at Republican Convention,” Guardian (July 22, 2016), https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/21/donald-trump-republican-national-convention-speech.
David Smith, “Trump reaches for Nixon playbook after protests that have rocked America,” Guardian, June 7, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/07/donald-trump-re-election-nixon-protests-strategy.
Based on data from the 2016 American National Election Studies Time Series Survey, Drakulich et al., (2020, p. 392) found evidence of Trump’s law and order rhetoric serving as a dog whistle: whereas among the entire set of those surveyed “feelings of warmth toward the police were not significantly related to vote choice,” among those high in racial resentment, support for the police did affect their choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Drakulich et al. (p. 394) conclude that, as during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s, during the 2016 election, “‘support for the police’ seemed to be a signal that mattered particularly to voters with high levels of racial resentment. This finding … shows that a subset of Americans may be cloaking their concerns about the racial order behind a superficially nonracial support of the police.” See also Drakulich et al. (p. 375) for a summary of findings from six decades’ worth of existing literature and survey data on politicians’ use of “law and order” as a coded racial appeal.
Another example of non-derogatory covertly coded speech is the phrase “wonder-working power,” used by George W. Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address. For empirical data of the differential effects produced by this phrase, see Albertson (2015). For further discussion of this and other non-derogatory dog whistles, see Saul (2018), as well as Saul and Drainville (forthcoming), who offer an illuminating discussion of a wide variety of examples, going well beyond just the most commonly cited racist dog whistles like “law and order.”
As an anonymous reviewer has pointed out, there’s also an important difference between covert codes like “valid” and ones like “law and order”: namely, why the narrow practices would arise at all. The coded use of “law and order” arises, not just in a certain structure of practices, but also in a certain type of sociohistorical and normative contexts—i.e., the practical background in which the coded practices arose and in which they’ve been deployed. There are certain questions about covertly coded speech which we can’t answer, without taking these sociohistorical and normative aspects and contexts into account—questions concerning the practical, social, and political goals and ends of using covertly coded speech. While these are certainly worthwhile questions, I must defer addressing them until future work, as doing so would require shifting our focus to different features of practices and actions, than the ones needed to present and defend the thesis of this paper.
A similar constraint holds of the contexts in which covertly coded speech is possible: if only the widespread practice is deployable in a given context, no covertly coded speech can be produced in that context. For example, suppose a speaker attempts to send a covertly coded message by uttering “states’ rights” to an audience composed of scholars of Constitutional law engaged in a conversation about the application of the 10th Amendment to state facemask mandates. In such a context, the covertly coded, racist usage of “states’ rights” might simply not be deployable. I discuss further cases of intended but unrealized covertly coded speech in Sect. 3.2 below.
How plausible must this denial be? In some cases, evidence about the speaker’s beliefs and attitudes might make it impossible to disown the coded message. In other cases, particularly low-stakes ones, the mere use of code seems enough to grant the speaker plausible deniability. For example, in the TV show Penn & Teller: Fool Us, the magicians Penn Jillette and Teller try to figure out how guests on the show perform their tricks, and then to communicate to the performer how they think their trick was done. To avoid revealing another magician’s secrets, they do so by speaking in code. Despite how easily anyone could “decode” these messages by searching online, there seems to be no backlash against Penn and Teller, suggesting a broad consensus that the codes they use do thus allow them to plausibly deny having revealed any secrets.
However, this needn’t be the only mechanism responsible for plausible deniability. See Camp (2018), who discusses the covertly coded use of “Dred Scott” as well as other kinds of speech which grant speakers plausible deniability.
That Trump’s usage adopts Nixon’s is further evidenced by Trump’s coupling “law and order” with references to the “silent majority,” a phrase also used by Nixon in 1968. Roberts and Jacobs, “Donald Trump Proclaims Himself ‘Law and Order’ Candidate at Republican Convention.”
As the legal scholar Haney López (2014, pp. 23–24) explains, Nixon’s use of the phrase “shifted the issue from a defense of white supremacy to a more neutral-seeming concern with ‘order,’ while simultaneously stripping the activists of moral stature.”
The legal scholar Alexander (2012, pp. 40–41) notes that appealing to “law and order” was a widespread strategy of those opposing the Civil Rights movement well before Nixon’s 1968 campaign, starting in the mid-1950s.
Convict leasing was the practice of state penitentiaries “leasing out” prisoners to private businesses to do heavy, dangerous labor, for which they received no pay. The vast majority of prisoners were Black and had been convicted for petty or specially constructed crimes (such as vagrancy), often on false charges. Convict leasing was explicitly permitted by the Constitutional amendment that had abolished slavery, and it existed in some form through the 1940’s. Blackmon (2009).
Though she doesn’t take a practice-focused approach, Camp (2018) also focuses on cases where communicated content can’t be adequately captured or explained solely in terms of the speaker’s communicative intention. More careful attention to such phenomena, Camp argues, productively complicates some of our theoretical tools, such as the notions of common ground or what’s said.
For the purposes of this paper, I’ll be working with a somewhat simplified notion of a linguistic community as a set of speakers who can and do understand one another because they’ve acquired the same patterns of linguistic behavior via socialization. However, our actual linguistic communities are articulated in complex ways, with many, often overlapping sub-communities, fuzzy boundaries, and shifting (and even contested) memberships.
When Donald Trump used such language in reference to NFL players in September 2017, a number of observers, including Hillary Clinton, called it a racist dog whistle. For example, Hillary Clinton called it a “dog whistle to his base.” Ian Schwartz, “Hillary Clinton: Quite Telling That Trump Is Willing To Attack Black Athletes, ‘Dog Whistle’ To Base,” RealClearPolitics, Sept. 25, 2017, https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/09/25/hillary_clinton_quite_telling_that_trump_is_willing_to_attack_black_athletes_dog_whistle_to_base.html.
Winter (2006) summarizes the empirical data on differences between Americans’ support for welfare and for Social Security, and argues that this difference is attributable to how the two have been racialized—while “welfare” is associated with blackness (and hence with racist stereotypes about Black Americans), Social Security is associated with whiteness.
Roughly, the social meaning encompasses the beliefs, expectations, norms, and ideals that members of a community typically associate with an institution, practice, or linguistic expression, as the product of their shared socialization into those institutions, practices, or into the use of that language. For a more detailed discussion of social meaning, see Stanley (2015), pp. 157 − 62, 167 − 68, and Haslanger (2018).
Though Stanley argues that, through association, the negative social meaning becomes part of the content of an expression like “law and order,” he’s careful to note that such contents needn’t always be propositional (p. 146). They could also take the form of, for instance, emotional or normative effects, which can be better modeled by an expressivist semantics, as contributions to a conversation which introduce preference orderings that rank possible worlds (rather than as propositions that rule certain possible worlds in or out).
See also Saul and Drainville (forthcoming, § 1.3), noting that, when there’s an established usage, unintentional dog-whistle speech can take either of the two forms identified by Saul, overt (i.e., expressions that were designed as codes and that function by signaling a particular content of which the in-group is aware) and covert (i.e., expressions that function by raising certain attitudes to salience, without the awareness of those affected).
Saul calls this type of speech a “covert dogwhistle,” though her usage of “covert” differs from mine. Saul’s covert dogwhistles would be a proper subset of the category of covertly coded speech identified in Sect. 2 above, because her distinction between “overt” and “covert” tracks only the affected hearers’ conscious awareness of what I call the coded message. However, I don’t distinguish between coded messages that are received consciously or unconsciously in this paper. As I use the term, “covertly coded” speech is a subset of coded speech distinguished by the three features identified in Sect. 2—differential effects, hiddenness, and recurrence.
See also Hess (2020), who offers another practice-focused account of reappropriated slurs, employing a somewhat different conception of practice, in order to explain some of the same phenomena as Anderson.
For example, social meanings can affect reasoning and behavior by making a derogatory stereotype salient, prompting certain emotional responses, or making certain norms, values, or frames salient. For a more detailed survey of the range of propagandistic mechanisms, see Stanley (2015), 139 − 72, and Quaranto & Stanley (2021).
See also Dewey (1925), Chap. 5 more generally for his pragmatist approach to language and communication. G.H. Mead’s (1934) account of thought and intentionality also emphasizes communal representational practices. Mead (pp. 42–82) is particularly sensitive to the interactive aspect of communication, and the ways in which this interactivity depends on agents’ sharing linguistic dispositions, which in turn is possible only because these dispositions have been acquired in a social context.
That is, in keeping conversational score, speakers and hearers assign normative statuses (commitments and entitlements) to themselves and to one another, and they do so against a background of normative discursive practices. Brandom (p. 159) argues that these practices are not merely regularities in how we in fact keep conversational score; rather, they prescribe how we should attribute commitments to speakers and entitlements to hearers.
So, while my account of covertly coded speech is ultimately compatible with an inferentialist account, there’s no lossless translation of my proposal into claims solely about individuals’ ascriptions of discursive commitments. Rather, my proposal could complement such an account, by saying why and when different audience members ascribe commitments differently, and by explaining how the differences in their scorekeeping arise from the structure of practices in which audience members are differentially positioned.
In this paper I focus on speakers’ and hearers’ behavior, rather their mental representations, propositional attitudes, or affective states. Of course, the particular actions that make up a practice typically involve and may sometimes require certain representational mental states (beliefs, intentions, and expectations) and, especially for derogatory dog whistles, performances of a practice and their reception are often accompanied by certain affective states. A more nuanced account of what our practices are like should account for the relations between performances of a practice and practitioners’ beliefs, attitudes, and emotions. However, providing such an account is out of the scope of this paper, as my goal here is to identify the structure of practices that enables covertly coded speech. And as the worked-out examples in this and the previous section show, identifying covertly coded practices doesn’t require full information about speakers’ and hearers’ mental states. We can identify the relevant structure of practices on the basis of empirical and historical data about the effects of utterances.
Searle (1995) also takes collective phenomena to ultimately reduce to individual mental states.
Haslanger (2016, p. 126n9) argues that, unlike Lewis’ conventions, practices aren’t always arbitrary, needn’t be common knowledge among participants, and aren’t always mutually advantageous.
For a more detailed account of how such socialization might give rise to practices, see Hanna & Harrison (2004), pp. 169–72.
Of course, a practice-focused approach is not the only alternative to an individualistic view that focuses on speakers’ or hearers’ mental states. Indeed, I’ve referred to several such alternatives in the course of this paper, including Saul’s (2018) account of unintentional dog-whistling and Camp’s (2018) analysis of insinuation. There are also other non-individualist alternatives which I have not been able to address here. To name but a few, covertly coded speech might be analyzed in terms of conventionalized implicatures, conventionalized indirect speech acts (Asher & Lascarides, 2001), speech acts that change the context in which they’re performed (Sbisà, 2002), speakers’ direct intentions and hearers’ imaginative engagement (Lepore & Stone, 2014), or discourse structure (Roberts, 2018).
In other words, the common ground between a speaker and hearer is the set of propositions which are common knowledge between them, in the sense of common knowledge defined by Lewis (1969, p. 56) and refined by Schiffer (1972), where some proposition p is common knowledge between S and H (or, in Schiffer’s terms, mutual knowledge) if and only if S and H both know that p, both know that the other knows that p, and so on ad infinitum. Thus, the notion of common ground Clark uses is also the one employed in Stalnaker (1978), and closely related to, but also more precise than, the earlier notions of common ground appearing in Karttunen (1974) and Stalnaker (1974).
However, disguisement, as Clark describes it, does require the speaker to intend two different speaker meanings to be received by the two different hearers; covertly coded speech as I’ve described it doesn’t require or assume this to be the case.
So, a reader compelled by an intentionalist view like Clark’s could interpret my description of the pair of practices underlying covertly coded speech as identifying the distinctive structural features of the communal common grounds which speakers rely on to produce covertly coded speech.
More specifically, Winter (p. 406) reports that “On a scale from zero to one, support for Social Security spending averages 0.745…, or just about exactly midway between the ‘increase’ and ‘keep it the same’ responses. … In contrast—and not surprisingly—support for spending on welfare and on food stamps is much lower among whites (average of 0.31 and 0.38, respectively).”
Though Khoo notes the possibility that hearers may infer certain coded messages on the basis of beliefs about “the kind of people who use [a given] expression” (2017, p. 48 n. 43), he does not elaborate on that mechanism in this work. He does, however, say more about such beliefs in more recent work on code words (Khoo, 2021, p. 153), where he describes such inferences as involving “meta-linguistic bridge principles”—i.e., beliefs about the pattern of usage of a given expression.
Thus, as in my account, the in-group, per Henderson and McCready’s account, includes anyone familiar with how, e.g., racists talk, regardless of whether they would talk that way or endorse that talk or its message.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to give special thanks to David Beaver for his unwavering support and his unique blend of encouragement and challenge, without which this work wouldn’t dare be what it is. My sincerest thanks to Jason Stanley, Hans Kamp, Josh Dever, Ray Buchanan, Mark Sainsbury, and David Sosa for many generative discussions and helpful comments. I would also like to thank Brendan Learnihan-Sylvester and Alex Rausch for their feedback on various stages of this work from its earliest forms. Thank you to Laurenz Casser, whose support has been essential during the most challenging stages. I’m grateful to the organizers and audiences of the UT Austin Graduate Colloquium in 2018 and the University of Pittsburgh–based, online Words Workshop in 2020 for their questions and comments, especially Michael Barnes, Laura Caponetto, Nikki Ernst, Megan Hyska, Jonathan Ichikawa, Quill Kukla, Maxime Lepoutre, Sally McConnell-Ginet, Jennifer Saul, and Bronwyn Stippa. Thank you also to Roy Sorensen and the participants of his Social Epistemology seminar in spring 2021 for stimulating conversation. Finally, I’d like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their detailed engagement and constructive feedback, which markedly improved the work.
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Quaranto, A. Dog whistles, covertly coded speech, and the practices that enable them. Synthese 200, 330 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03791-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03791-y