Dogwhistles, Trust and Ideology

Abstract

Given that someone is consistently untruthful, why should we ever trust them? The question is not academic. Consider politicians and others who are known to consistently lie, but who are still listened to and voted back into office. This talk addresses this puzzle via three mechanisms: (i) a theory of source evaluation based on interactional histories and heuristics for judgments of reliability (McCready, 2015), (ii) a game-theoretic view of how speaker ideologies and political positions are communicated by linguistic acts (Burnett, 2018; Henderson and McCready, 2018), and (iii) a theory of how ideological considerations are valued alongside truth-conditional content. In the process, an analysis of fake news claims is provided.