Vigilance and hypervigilance

Abstract

Abstract In this chapter we will continue to explore how listeners do/should react to dogwhistles, given that persona construction is interactional. In particular, we return to the core RSA framework developed in Chapter 4 and consider the behavior of L1, the sociolinguistically aware listener. How should a listener optimally reason about a speaker’s persona, assuming a speaker that is attempting to maximize their social utility relative to an audience? This chapter begins to look at this question and identifies two strategies that we see in actual listeners, which we dub vigilance and hypervigilance. The first follows 92from the RSA theory we have developed in previous chapters, and, in fact, we will see that it involves a standard kind of implicature familiar from the RSA literature on implicatures in the truth-conditional domain. The second we relate to the credibility result for cheap talk games of Farrell 1993, where a neologism is credible to the degree that the interests of the sender align with those of the receiver.