Dept of Philosophy Fall 2024 Colloquium: Robert Henderson, University of Arizona Linguistics

When

3 to 5 p.m., Sept. 27, 2024

Title:  Signaling without saying: The semantics & pragmatics of dogwhistles

Abstract:  A dogwhistle is a piece of language that sends one message to an outgroup while at the same time sending a second (often taboo, controversial, or inflammatory) message to an ingroup. We propose an analysis of dogwhistles in the setting of social meaning games that treats them as signaling the persona of the speaker, and in some circumstances enabling an enrichment of the conventional meaning of the expression. We compare this account with views in terms of conventional implicature, invited inference, and classical gricean implicature. We further show how this formal framework allows, not just a account of dogwhistles, but opens up a way to analyze a variety of sociopragmatic phenomena involving trust, reliability, ideology, standpoints, etc. from a probabilistic game-theoretic perspective.

The talk will take place from 3:00 - 5:00 pm in Social Science 224.