Dogwhistles and trust

Abstract

Abstract Why should listeners ever trust a speaker whose utterances are not truth-tracking? It may seem to be irrational, yet there are many examples, especially in the political sphere. This chapter uses the tools presented in this book so far, augmented with existing work on reliability and trust, to address this puzzle in three parts. First we spell out and contextualize the starting puzzle in a theory of source evaluation based on interactional histories and heuristics for judgments of reliability (McCready 2015). We then build a theory of how ideological considerations are valued alongside truth-conditional content. This is then used together with temperature parameters on truth-conditional content and social meaning to model the degree to which each is valued in particular contexts.