Signaling without Saying develops game-theoretic approaches to social meaning to model the phenomenon of dogwhistles, perhaps best known from political speech. These constructions involve language that sends one message to an out-group while at the same time sending a second-often taboo, controversial, or inflammatory-message to an in-group. Robert Henderson and Elin McCready show that dogwhistles should not be modeled in the same way as related language, like slurs, and nor should they be treated via standard Gricean implicatures computed over truth-conditional meaning; instead, they should be treated as primarily bearing social meaning, as understood by modern variationist sociolinguistic theories.
The book identifies and models two different kinds of dogwhistle meaning, while also exploring a variety of related phenomena. The authors show how novel implicatures in the social meaning domain can arise when a listener detects a dogwhistle, and connect them to implicatures familiar in the truth-conditional domain. Social meaning, they argue, can be added to theories of trust in testimonial evidence, and dogwhistles can help to establish trust with an audience, even when expressing false propositions. The final chapter of the book looks at connections between dogwhistles and other issues important in epistemology and philosophy of language which might involve social meaning, such as standpoint theory.
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This book explores the phenomenon of dogwhistles, whereby language is used to send one message to an out-group while at the same time sending a second-often taboo, controversial, or inflammatory-message to an in-group. The authors use a game-theoretical approach to social meaning to identify and model two kinds of dogwhistle meaning.
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1: Introduction
2: Dogwhistles as a semantic/pragmatic phenomenon
3: A probabilistic pragmatics for dogwhistles
4: Identifying dogwhistles
5: Enriching dogwhistles
6: Vigilance and hypervigilance
7: Dogwhistles and trust
8: Beyond dogwhistles
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Robert Henderson is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. His research is in formal semantics and pragmatics with a special focus on the indigenous languages of Mesoamerica, especially Mayan languages, which he has studied through many years of fieldwork. His theoretical work focuses on plurality, quantification, and the structure of discourse, along with the logics needed to model those systems in human languages. Elin McCready is
Professor of Linguistics at Aoyama Gakuin University. Her main area of research is formal semantics and pragmatics, with secondary interests in epistemology, game theory, and feminist philosophy. She is
the author of the OUP volumes Reliability in Pragmatics (2015) and The Semantics and Pragmatics of Honorification (2019), and co-editor of Epistemology for the Rest of the World (with Stephen Stich and Masaharu Mizumoto; 2018).
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Develops a formalized Bayesian Rational Speech Act model for dogwhistles
Provides a template for exploring the pragmatics of other kinds of social meaning beyond dogwhistles
Draws parallels between pragmatic computation in the social meaning domain and the truth-conditional domain
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780198886341
Publisert
2024
Utgiver
Vendor
Oxford University Press
Vekt
482 gr
Høyde
252 mm
Bredde
176 mm
Dybde
15 mm
Aldersnivå
UP, 05
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
176