Silent Dogwhistles

Dogwhistles have recently begun to receive more attention in the philosophical literature.1 They are usually explored with a focus on manipulative and corrupting speech—how certain phrases or words can be used to consciously or unconsciously influence audiences or audience-subsets. As such, dogwhistles can have significant impact not only on political discourse, but on society more broadly. They can function in manipulative and corruptive ways, shaping both conscious and unconscious attitudes and senses of in-group membership. As Drainville and Saul (2024) note, in philosophy, explorations into dogwhistles have primarily focused on the linguistic side of things, owing to the fact that they have mostly been undertaken by philosophers of language. As a result, insufficient attention has been paid to other ways in which dogwhistles can occur and influence people. Saul and Drainville's study aims to fill part of this gap in the literature by focusing on visual dogwhistles. My argument in this paper is offered in a similar spirit: I want to draw attention to a part of our linguistic practices that so far have not been explored in detail as a potential dogwhistle—acts of remaining silent. I argue that such silences can function in similar ways to the “spoken”; dogwhistles that have so far been the main focus of philosophical discussions. More specifically, I will show that acts of remaining silent can be overt code2 dogwhistles. My discussion aims to shed light on silence as a dimension of (manipulative) communicative acts and, at the same time, will highlight the communicative and political potential of silence.3 A question that might arise at this point is why the statement that dogwhistles can be silent is interesting at all. Obviously dogwhistles involve silence in some way. For one, literal dogwhistles, the ones we borrowed the metaphor from, work on the very premise that only some (dogs) can hear them, while they are “silent” for others (humans). Likewise, the kind of dogwhistles that the literature has come to understand as akin to code-words are supposed to communicate a message that can only be “heard” by a certain subsets of audiences. Put differently, a particular “dogwhistled” message might be “silent” for some, but “loud and clear” for others. When I talk about acts of remaining silent; however, I have something much more specific in mind. I am thinking of somebody literally remaining silent, either in a direct exchange, or when the broader context would require them to comment. My discussion is about silence as a communicative act in and of itself. All this will require further elaboration. Here is my plan for the paper: I'll first identify the definition of dogwhistles that is central to this paper—overt code dogwhistles, following Saul (2024), to then clarify what I mean by conversational silence. I'll define the notion as cases where somebody remains literally silent, and that silence carries communicative force. In a third step, I will present and discuss various cases of silent dogwhistles: I will start with two fictional examples, in order to illustrate how, in theory, a silent dogwhistle can be created. Next, I discuss two less straightforward cases, but argue that these can still be considered as silent dogwhistling: Donald Trump's silence during the January 6th storm on the Capitol and Justin Trudeau's silence in response to a reporter's question about Black Lives Matter protesters in the US. I will conclude with some general remarks about the implications of this discussion for our political analysis of speech. As mentioned above, there is no lack of work on dogwhistles. Conventionally, we often understand dogwhistles as a kind of “code,” intentionally crafted to communicate a particular message to only one part of an audience. However, dogwhistles can also work by raising to salience subconscious attitudes, for example, racist resentments, without the receiver of the message being aware of that.4 Saul (2024) proposes a “bifurcated model” of dogwhistles, taking into account both kinds of dogwhistles just characterized—differentiating between overt code dogwhistles (referring to the first phenomenon just mentioned), and covert effect dogwhistles (referring to the second). It is her model of “overt-code” dogwhistles I'll be using throughout. Note that “covert effect” dogwhistles work in quite different ways than “overt code” dogwhistles, even though they share certain features. This paper will be focusing on the latter for two reasons: For one, the kind of silences I am interested in have, so far, been underexplored in discussions of dogwhistles and political speech generally. My goal is to show that silences can function as dogwhistles, and focusing on only one part of the bifurcated model seems to be, for now, the pragmatic choice. In addition, the kind of silence exemplified in the cases I will go on to provide seems to fit better with the overt code model. Silences may also have a covert effect in some cases,5 but this would need backing up through empirical studies. To my knowledge, no such studies currently exist. My focus will therefore remain on the use of silence as an overt code. “—Intentional: a term or speech act with (at least) two plausible interpretations, such that one of these violates some widespread norm, and is meant to be understood primarily by those who are comfortable with this norm violation; and the other appears innocent, and is meant to be understood primarily by those who would not want to see the norm being violated. —Unintentional: a term or speech act with (at least) two plausible interpretations, one of which violates some widespread norm, and one of which doesn't violate that norm, which is used by someone unaware of the norm-violating interpretation.” A classic example of this is George W. Bush's statement that “there's power, wonder-working power, in the goodness and idealism and faith of the American people” (quoted in Saul 2018, 362).6 This statement was made in a particular context. Bush needed the votes of fundamentalist Christians, but also of those who might find explicit appeals to fundamentalists suspicious. The words “wonder-working power,” then, functioned as a dogwhistle to fundamentalists, to whom this “is a favoured phrase that refers specifically to the power of Christ.” (ibid., 362). 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I then of political silences I to silent dogwhistles. To on of this can something interesting about political speech. For one, the present discussion that the of is broader than silences have, so far, not been at as dogwhistles, I see this as the phenomenon of dogwhistles and in different context we can find we also see that silence is Dogwhistles can be manipulative in various can on the of and norm in and often literally can also have this effect on which political speech is and of the why dogwhistles are so interesting is that they have philosophers to into account more than what is in the in political quite usually meant to be by just dogwhistles, some in more than have made aware of the and of of conversational and the of that come with the of dogwhistles. 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