Dogwhistles: Persona and Ideology

A dogwhistle is a piece of language that sends one message to an out- group while at the same time sending a second (often taboo, controversial, or in- flammatory) 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 through the connections of social personas and ideolo- gies, which we model formally. We show that this account improves over pitfalls encountered in other accounts (Henderson & McCready 2019b; Khoo 2017; Stanley 2015), which includes in some of our own previous work. 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 like unconscious bias and epistemic hypervigilance

Testing Epistemic Injustice

This work builds on the trivial observation that everyone is not trusted equally. One’s gender, ethnic group, occupation etc. will affect how one’s information is believed and interpreted by others. We begin by reviewing past approaches to reliability and epistemic injustice, and the factors which affect how one’s reliability is evaluated by others in discourse. We then discuss recent experimental results which show that the linguistic manipulation of gender seems  to affect the strategies with which the source’s reliability is evaluated. We argue that masculine sources benefit from more charitable assumptions than feminine ones. To support this claim, we present the results of a fine-grained categorization task. The results of this task seem to support our claim about charity, i.e. that a masculine source can more easily claim competence about a topic categorized as feminine, whereas the converse appears less true