Silent Dogwhistles

Abstract

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 code ² 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.

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). On the other hand, anyone not versed in the kind of language fundamentalists use would not have any particular association with this term, nor derive any sense of belonging from its use. So, (a) a (fundamentalist) Christian audience might read Bush's statement as one that explicitly yields a Christian message—that the “power of Christ” resides among the American people—and (b) they might understand him as trying to communicate to them something along the lines of “I am one of you.” This interpretation of Bush's utterance shows us, then, how one and the same statement can be performed to deliberately communicate different things to two subsets of an audience.

At the same time, we can imagine something like this happening unintentionally. Say I am running late for my train, and only manage to get it because there is an unexpected delay in my train's arrival at the station. When I tell my friend about this, suppose I say, “… and through some wonder-working power I managed to get the train after all!” My friend might not think anything of my using these words in this context (and, let's say, neither do I). But, if a fundamentalist Christian is sitting near us and hears me say this, they might think that I am actually talking about the “wonder-working power of Christ,” and believe that I am “one of them.”

Aptly summed up by Saul (2024, 38): “The select group knows the code, and happily receives the message; while the broader audience does not realize what is happening, and takes the message to have a more innocent meaning.” However, the code is “overt” because it is supposed to be explicitly understood by a group of people (see ibid., 42).

So far for the definition of overt-code dogwhistles, specifically. This entails some features that dogwhistles of this kind tend to share. ⁷ It is particularly relevant that overt-code dogwhistles make use of a certain set of background assumptions, shared by a speaker and a specific target audience, but ignored or not known by others. ⁸ In politically charged examples (such as racist dogwhistles) this will often involve the navigation of conflicting norms in a particular context, as sets of background assumptions differ between the multiple audiences this will necessarily involve. Provided this, deniability is crucial (and a useful thing dogwhistles can provide us with). Even if someone is challenged on their use of a dogwhistle term, because their message is implicit and (ideally) only recoverable for a certain subset of an audience (though, of course, we do sometimes figure it out anyways), they can deny the encoded meaning. For example, Santana (2021, 1) takes deniability to be the defining feature of dogwhistles—understanding them as involving a “deniable violation of egalitarian norms.” ⁹ And, as Khoo (2021, 149) highlights in his discussion of code-words, one central reason why we speak in code in the first place is that leaving certain things implicit allows us to navigate misinterpretations, for instance; but is also beneficial when we're not sure how an audience might take our message. This is especially useful when we want to be able to deny norm-violating interpretations of certain conversational contributions.

This philosophical discussion about norms and dogwhistles has been strongly informed by Mendelberg (2001, 2008). Focusing on the US, Mendelberg discusses how overt racism became less and less acceptable, until people didn't want to think of themselves as racist anymore. According to Mendelberg, certain norms of racial equality came to be effective, while underlying racial resentment still continued. ¹⁰ Dogwhistles can, on the surface, conform to these norms, but still violate them on other levels.

It's important to note that, as Saul (2018, 365) points out, Mendelberg mostly talks about covert effect dogwhistles—those that give rise to resentments without the message's receiver being aware of it. This is different from the cases we are focusing on—after all, for codes to communicate, an audience is required to understand and be fully aware of the concealed message. What still stands is the point that, in overt code cases too, dogwhistles navigate certain existing norms that only part of an audience subscribes to. In Khoo's (2021, 150) words: “Coded speech generates plausible deniability that makes it unclear whether the norm-violating behavior really is norm-violating.” This highlights, again, the existence of multiple audiences, and how complex it can be to navigate differing assessments of what counts as norm-violating.

Let me now make explicit what makes (overt) dogwhistles manipulative. For one, sending a kind of code to a sub-group of an audience while trying to keep another part of the audience unaware of it is not a very upfront way of communicating. Dogwhistles can be misleading—for example, they can make it opaque to part of an audience where a speaker “really” stands, while still expressing (for instance) misinformation that is difficult to call out. In addition, dogwhistles have a strong affective side: they can give people a heightened sense of belonging to a privileged ingroup. As such, they can boost and even strengthen certain ideological commitments. For one, the kind of belonging and intimacy that overt code dogwhistles can raise between a speaker and an audience seems politically and ideologically central. Dogwhistles can stir debates precisely because part of an audience might be very aware of the message, while other parts are either unaware or simply unsure. Overt codes—including silent codes—tell us something crucial about our language use: how we develop senses of belonging through speech, navigate conflicting norms, and maintain deniability.

All that said, I now want to outline what I mean by conversational silence, before I explore some examples of silent overt code dogwhistles.

Silence as distinctively communicative has been largely absent from discussions in philosophy until recently (e.g., see Tanesini 2018; Goldberg 2020; Klieber 2021, 2024a; Degerman and Bellazzi 2024; Holdier 2024)—while it has received much more attention in linguistics and social anthropology (e.g., Tannen and Saville-Troike 1985; Goffman 1981; Ephratt 2012, 2017; Kurzon 2011; Jensen 1973; Jaworski 1997, 1993; more on the side of political science, see Vieira 2020a, 2020b; Schröter 2013). The study of silence in the literature reveals many ways of thinking about the phenomenon—for example, such as silences that can be described as pauses, lapses, or omissions/what remains unsaid.

A lot of this linguistic nuance will be absent from my philosophical discussion in this paper. I am going to largely exclude the idea of silence as omissions—that is, cases where we do speak, but nonetheless “remain silent” about something else. While these omissions can be striking and quite politically significant, I am more interested here in a more concrete sense of silence: cases where somebody literally does not say anything, and wants to communicate something by not saying anything. For the purposes of this paper, I will term this kind of silence conversational silence—a silent conversational contribution that is intended to bring something across, even though nothing is said explicitly. ¹¹

For now, I simply want to stress that, in this case, silence functions as an active conversational contribution. In short, it is a specific, literal kind of silence I have in mind when talking about “conversational silence.” ¹²

While it may not be the most obvious interpretation, I consider this vice-chancellor's silence in response to the invitation to be a case of literal, conversational silence. Not only their position, but their having been explicitly invited to comment, urges them to say something. Making no statement at all constitutes a public conversational silence in my sense.

We can communicate a lot with what we leave unsaid while talking a lot about something else. Still, it seems that the omissive sense of remaining silent about something is a different conversational phenomenon from the more direct and literal ways of remaining silent we've seen. I am not claiming that omissive silence is not (politically) interesting, or shouldn't receive attention. But, it is, arguably, a much broader category than acts of literally remaining silent, and, to some extent, has already been covered in discussions of (political) speech. ¹³ The more literal form of silence, however, has received far less directed attention.

For now, let me define conversational silence ¹⁴ as follows:

As we've seen, conversational silence can come in different shapes. What differentiates conversational from omissive silence, ultimately, is that, in cases of conversational silence, nothing is uttered explicitly—whereas omissions mean that you say something but purposefully leave something else unsaid in the course of this. ¹⁵

So, with some important definitions out of the way, let me raise the following question: why are silences so interesting when it comes to political speech, and in particular political dogwhistles?

For one, I want to stress again that communicative silences are part of our linguistic practices. How we shape our linguistic lives, so to speak, is not only a theoretical matter—it is highly dependent on social and political circumstances and environments. Most of us would agree that speech is of tremendous importance in our political discourses. If silences can do things that speech can do—that is, communicate things, have impact, for example—they also need to be considered as having political and social impact.

The highly contextual nature of conversational silence makes it a very flexible communicative tool. One and the same act, varying only in length and (often) accompanied by non-verbal cues, can mean very different things depending on when and how it is used, and who it is used by. So, two points about conversational silence seem important to emphasize, especially in the context of dogwhistles. First, silence grants a very high degree of deniability. Since we don't say anything explicitly, we do not commit ourselves in the same way as in cases where we produce a very precise speech act with a direct message, or even, arguably, when we use a code that could be researched and documented by our audiences.

Second, silence can be used to send a particular message to certain people who have some knowledge that is salient to the context, without other people knowing what is communicated by that silence. Reconsider example (1), in which Troy is visiting his dad with his girlfriend Sam, and is talking to his dad about a trip the two plan to take. If we don't know that Troy's dad is fairly strict and wants his son to focus on school, the silence would arguably be more ambiguous. The example itself hints at that: Sam realizes Walter communicates something with his silence, but can't decipher it quite as confidently because she's lacking important background information.

These considerations suggest that some silences could function as dogwhistles. If even not saying anything at all can communicate politically risky messages, we have a reason to extend the linguistic “level” on which we analyze dogwhistles. Conversely, this also shows us something about the power of silence. An analysis of silent dogwhistles will draw attention to silence as a powerful communicative phenomenon, one that can be used flexibly and with various purposes.

The structure of a silent dogwhistle will look something like this: Someone remains conversationally silent in a particular context, where there is some known, relatively high-stakes context lurking in the background, while there are “multiple audiences” and their varying interpretations to be considered. One interpretation of the silence is norm-violating, while the other interpretation is more innocent. Silence can allow us to maintain a high degree of deniability, relying on various possible interpretations of that silence, which may diverge depending on audience and their background and contextual knowledge.

What emerges from the literature review above is that, sometimes, dogwhistle terms or phrases are established very explicitly and intentionally, and used with this prior established meaning in mind. Examples of this are white supremacist codes, such as putting three parenthesis around a name “(((name)))” to dogwhistle that someone is Jewish (discussed in Saul 2024, 45), or using the number “88” (which numerically represents “HH,” that is, “Heil Hitler”) to dogwhistle that one belongs to a neo-Nazi group (see ibid., 21). A community establishes the code, and understands each other as they communicate using this particular code, while it remains unclear or innocent to others. Other times, however, dogwhistle terms or phrases are used without being clearly established prior, instead speakers trust or hope that the right group will be able to recover it in the right ways.

We see in this example how silence can take on the character of a pre-established code with a specific meaning (with a similar structure to the previously mentioned white supremacists codes, but clearly much more innocent than that). Someone who doesn't know, such as the teacher conducting the exam, may not pick up on the character of this silence. This, I would say, is a kind of (innocent) silent dogwhistle. The established norm in the background is that you're not supposed to cheat in these exams. And while the “ingroup” message is not a high-stakes or a political one, giving another student the answer violates the norm established in that context. The innocent meaning of the silence, here, is that it is simply meaningless in the sense that the teacher is not supposed to pick up on it.

There are a few ways this could go. Likely, there will be some media-discussion about the silence. One option is that no one really gets it—it's taken to be an awkward rather than a strategic pause. Another option is that everyone sees through it immediately. But, there is also the chance that some people will see it either as hoped (the polite refusal to be drawn into this debate), while others realize that it is a tacit confirmation of a continuous support for the opinion in question. Note too that this shows how the “innocent” message can be more complex than a simple “I don't have anything to say” or being understood as meaningless. ¹⁶ The fact that the silence could be meaningless, however, might do some work in terms of deniability in practice.

This story is illustrative for what silence can, theoretically, do, and shows the general structure of a silent dogwhistle, where the silence isn't an explicitly pre-established in-group code. There is a norm in the background and a set of assumptions shared by a large number of people, that makes the topic in question controversial in some sense. Being in favor of it violates this norm, and silence, at least so P hopes, helps to navigate this violation.

However, despite similarities, silent dogwhistles will be somewhat different from the more common “spoken” cases discussed in the literature. The one obvious difference is that in cases of silence, nothing is said. And not saying anything can often be quite disruptive. If we lack the background to decipher certain overt codes (like “88”), they may slip us by completely. In most cases of silence, that is unlikely to happen (maybe with the exception of case (4)). Remaining silent as an answer to a question, or where the context or our role requires a comment from us, is usually at least a bit disruptive or noticeable. At the same time, silences themselves simply do often occur in ways that are, broadly speaking, quite meaningless. We might be silent for no special reason at all, or we might not know what to say. This is a very common interpretation in cases where silence occurs as an answer to a question—someone is stumped, struggling for a good answer. As we will see, this feature can do a lot of work for silent dogwhistles when it comes to their “innocent” interpretations (in contrast with their “norm-violating” ones). While such meaningless/struggling-for-words silences still violate some conversational norms, they are “innocent” with respect to the content of the answer (again, note that innocent interpretations of silent dogwhistles can be more complex as well).

Cases (4) and (5) were supposed to illustrate some of these basic structures of silent dogwhistles. However, fictional examples only take us so far. While example (5) still has political motivation, reality will be more messy. I think that when silent dogwhistles are effective, they will be very effective. But, since silent dogwhistles have not been studied extensively, we don't yet have a repertoire of clearly established and studied examples (unlike for various spoken dogwhistles, at this point). Because, as Saul (2024, 65–67) points out, it is in the nature of dogwhistles to be non-obvious, clear examples are not always easy to come by. But, the fact that it is not always clear whether something is a dogwhistles, or what kind it might be, should not lead us to doubt that they exist. If we agree with this sentiment for dogwhistle terms, I think we should extend it to silent dogwhistles, too. I agree with Saul that many terms can be dogwhistles, but we need to study them properly to know exactly what they do. Once we are at the point of studying dogwhistle terms, they will likely not work as dogwhistles anymore, precisely because they have been discovered. Similar things go for the silent dogwhistles I want to consider below (more so for the first case, then the second). But, this doesn't mean that dogwhistling with silence isn't possible. We may still be able to show that dogwhistling with silence was attempted, and point out how even a failed attempt brings with it some of the benefits provided through dogwhistle communication.

In the following, I want to look at two real-life, slightly messy cases of what I think were at least attempted silent dogwhistles. Each displays distinctive facets: The first—Donald Trump's multiple-hour public silence during the 6th of January attack on the Capitol—is not an instance of silence in direct response to a question, but it is still literal because Trump said nothing when saying something was clearly due. The second—Justin Trudeau answering with silence to an interview question about the treatment of Black Lives Matter protesters in the US—highlights how one act of remaining silent can instantiate several dogwhistles, depending on the audience addressed, norms navigated, and the kind deniability attempted to obtain. ¹⁷

In this paper, I have investigated whether the phenomenon of dogwhistles can include acts of remaining silent, too. First, I defined dogwhistles and explained my focus on what Saul (2024) calls overt code dogwhistles, to then characterize what I mean by conversational silence. I then discussed several examples of political silences which, I argue, amount to silent dogwhistles.

To conclude, let me briefly remark on how all of this can tell us something interesting about political speech. For one, the present discussion highlights that the category of “dogwhistle” is broader than so-far recognized. Since silences have, so far, not really been looked at as dogwhistles, I see this project as emphasizing how broad the phenomenon of dogwhistles is, and in how many different context we can find them. But, we also see that silence itself is important. Dogwhistles can be manipulative in various ways—they can play on the affective qualities of ingroups and navigate norm violations in various, and often insidious, ways. Spelling out how literally saying nothing can also have this effect uncovers another level on which political speech (and silence) is powerful and influential.

One of the reasons why dogwhistles are so interesting is that they have urged philosophers to take into account more than what is explicitly put out in the open in political contexts. Dogwhistles, quite literally, aren't usually meant to be heard by just anyone. Different accounts analyzing dogwhistles, some discussed here in more details than others, have made us aware of the complexities and multiplicities of audiences, layers of conversations, conversational practices, and the role of deniability that come with the terrain of dogwhistles. In short, only focusing on the explicit contents of utterances could mean we miss something, and particularly miss how certain messages are politically manipulative. My discussion here has made the case that also silences are politically relevant in these ways. It is worth not only looking at what lies behind our utterances, but also our silences—how acts of remaining silent have communicative potential, potential which can be politically relevant in various ways.

The author declares no conflicts of interest.