Dogwhistles: Philosophical background and belief clusters

The aim of this paper is to examine philosophical assumptions behind dogwhistles, starting with their definition as speech acts that convey different meanings to specific audiences. As such, dogwhistles can be studied through frameworks like Grice’s Cooperative Principle, Stalnaker’s common ground, or Lewis’s conversational score. Our focus here, however, is Saul’s classification of overt and covert, as well as intentional and unintentional forms of dogwhistles. Covert dogwhistles are of particular interest because they bring the audience’s preexisting attitudes to the foreground, and do so outside the audience’s awareness. We propose that the mechanisms underlying covert dogwhistles can be illustrated through the analogy of belief clusters, shifting the focus from meaning ambiguity to interpretative ambiguity.