Abstract
Existing work on gaslighting ties it constitutively to facts about the intentions or prejudices of the gaslighter and/or his victim’s prior experience of epistemic injustice. I argue that the concept of gaslighting is more broadly applicable than has been appreciated: what is distinctive about gaslighting, on my account, is simply that a gaslighter confronts his victim with a certain kind of choice between rejecting his testimony and doubting her own basic epistemic competence in some domain. I thus hold that gaslighting is a purely epistemic phenomenon—not requiring any particular set of intentions or prejudices on the part of the gaslighter—and also that it can occur even in the absence of any prior experience of epistemic injustice. Appreciating the dilemmatic character of gaslighting allows us to understand its connection with a characteristic sort of epistemic harm, makes it easier to apply the concept of gaslighting in practice, and raises the possibility that we might discover its structure and the associated harm in surprising places.
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Notes
The 1944 film is itself based on Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play Gas Light.
I am thus open to endorsing a pluralism about the concept of gaslighting akin to the gender-concept pluralism defended by Jenkins (2016).
My discussion of conceptual engineering may call to mind a certain ameliorative tradition in social philosophy, as represented for example by Haslanger’s (2000) treatment of gender and race and Dembroff’s (2016) approach to the concept of sexual orientation. This tradition seeks to engineer concepts in order to achieve specific social and/or political goals. Though I do believe that the account of gaslighting I defend in what follows would, if widely adopted, have certain concrete positive social consequences, it is beyond the scope of this paper to argue for this conclusion. For this reason, I have focused on its theoretical fruitfulness rather than its possible social benefits. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing me to clarify this point.
This case first appeared on the blog What Is It Like To Be A Woman In Philosophy?.
Why might such hardened misogynists take the time to “proceed through each example to ‘demonstrate’ why [the victim] had actually misinterpreted” what was going on? We might imagine that they are serial pontificators who love to hear the sounds of their own voices, so that their “demonstrations” are something like a form of recreation for them. Alternatively, we might imagine that the victim herself requests an explanation of why they do not believe her account of what has happened to her. Modifying the case in these ways does not affect the intuitive force of the judgment that it involves gaslighting.
Ambramson (2014, 11) considers an objection along these lines:
“...it may be less than entirely clear that all of the examples with which I began are examples of gaslighting... A single instance of one person saying to another, “that’s crazy” may not appear—may not be—an instance of someone trying to destroy another’s standing to make claims. But when that form of interaction is iterated over and over again, when counterevidence to “that’s crazy” is dismissed, when nothing is treated as salient evidence for the possibility of disrupting the initial accusation, appearances shift.” (emphasis in original)
In the two imagined scenarios I have sketched above, however, I do not think that moving from a one-off exchange to a pattern of interactions renders plausible the idea that the gaslighters have the kinds of motivations Abramson’s account requires. In any case, as Podosky’s example demonstrates, we can have a strong intuition to the effect that a one-off exchange constitutes gaslighting.
Since anti-intentionalism differs from intentionalism in dropping a necessary condition from its account of gaslighting, one might reasonably worry that anti-intentionalist accounts will overgenerate rather than undergenerate. While it is difficult to evaluate this objection without looking at particular anti-intentionalist proposals, I address it in the context of my preferred account of gaslighting in Sect. 7.
Or, if those competing proposals were also found to be theoretically useful in some domain, at least to be no less appealing than they are.
As we will see in Sect. 5, my preferred account of gaslighting also holds that it is intimately connected to epistemic injustice—though not in a way that leads to undergeneration worries.
Stark (2019, 223) agrees that gaslighting need not occur along pre-existing gradients of social identity power.
Two clarifications regarding the sense in which Paula faces a dilemma: First, levels of confidence are graded. One might rationally respond to a forced epistemic choice between believing p and believing q (an epistemic dilemma) by maintaining full confidence is one of the two propositions and disbelieving the other, or one might respond by assigning a subjective probability of 0.5 to each proposition. The crucial thing is that, when faced by such an epistemic dilemma, one cannot rationally maintain full confidence in both p and q: one has a certain amount of probability to distribute between the two options—enough to assign probability 1 to one of the two or probability 0.5 to both—and one can choose how one distributes it. Second, gaslighting presents the victim with a normative dilemma. That is, if she is forming beliefs rationally, she must choose how to assign subjective probabilities to the proposition that she lacks basic epistemic competence and the proposition that the gaslighter is telling the truth in such a way that those probabilities add up to 1 (certainty). But if she is forming beliefs irrationally, she might not do this. She might, for example, become confident both that she lacks basic epistemic competence and that the gaslighter is lying. But this doesn’t mean that the original choice situation is not a dilemma. In the same way, someone who is faced with a practical dilemma (e.g. “Your money or your life!”) might, if not acting rationally, choose to give up both. But this does not indicate that the choice situation is not a dilemma.
When I say that my account of gaslighting is purely epistemic, I mean that it holds that all of the conditions which must be satisfied for an act of intentional communication to count as gaslighting are epistemic conditions—conditions involving knowledge, justification, testimony, and so forth.
Thanks to Jeremy Goodman for pressing me to clarify how gaslighting on my account differs from mere disagreement.
I maintain that B must know of the connection between p and her epistemic competence (rather than merely being in a position to know) because merely being in a position to appreciate the dilemma characteristic of gaslighting is not a state apt to cause the characteristic harm associated with the phenomenon.
The same point applies if he fails to believe one proposition and believes the other without knowledge-level doxastic justification.
Robin Dembroff suggests the following case with this structure, which motivates the intuition that knowledge-level doxastic justification is not enough to escape the charge of gaslighting: suppose you witness a hit-and-run accident caused by a blue car, and testify to this effect. Suppose further that you have an identical twin who is blue-to-green color blind. Someone who knows this confuses you and your twin, forming the justified false belief that you lack basic epistemic competence in forming beliefs about the colors of cars. If they insist that the car was green, not blue, they are gaslighting you. I take it that in this case, we are supposed to imagine that the person who has confused you with your twin lacks knowledge-level doxastic justification for the proposition that the car was green. If we instead assume that they have knowledge-level doxastic justification (for example, because they formed their false belief that the car was green on the basis testimony from a reliable source), intuitions are somewhat murkier. Readers who have strong intuitions about this modified case may be inclined to complicate (Dilemmatic Gaslighting) accordingly.
Why not revise condition (iii) so that what is required is a lack of knowledge rather than a lack of true belief with knowledge-level doxastic justification? My inclination is to say that when knowledge fails for Gettier-type reasons, an individual is excused from the charge of gaslighting. This is, however, not an issue on which I wish to take a particularly strong stand.
Podosky also introduces the term perspectival subversion to describe cases in which “subjects of gaslighting are targets of persistent conceptual challenges over time such that they come to doubt their ability to make conceptual judgments” (2021, 223). This harms strikes me as so similar to the primary harm characteristic of gaslighting that it should not be included in a list of secondary harms.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing me to clarify the relationship between the characteristic harm of gaslighting and the harms caused by other varieties of epistemic injustice.
This medical analogy also helps to clarify the sense in which the harm associated with gaslighting according to (Dilemmatic Gaslighting) is characteristic, given that one can face the choice between trusting someone’s testimony and coming to doubt one’s basic epistemic competence without experiencing gaslighting (as when the testifier correctly and justifiedly believes that the addressee lacks basic epistemic competence). In the medical case, the patient might experience the very same choice of whether to act on the physician’s recommendation in a case where the physician did have a compelling medical reason to suggest chemotherapy. But in such a case, if the patient acted on the physician’s recommendation, we would not think of her as being harmed by the treatment. In just the same way, if an individual faces the choice between trusting someone’s testimony and coming to doubt her basic epistemic competence, but the individual whose testimony has presented her with the dilemma believes correctly and with justification that she lacks basic epistemic competence, then her coming to believe that she lacks basic epistemic competence is not an epistemic harm: it is forming a justified and true belief. Doubting one’s own basic epistemic competence in a domain harms one only if this is not the epistemically responsible thing to do.
Abramson (2014) contains a helpful discussion of the ways in which intentional gaslighting is wrong.
Matters are somewhat more complicated in cases where the gaslighter has knowledge-level doxastic justification for his beliefs (though they are incorrect). Even in such cases, however, I think there is a sense in which the gaslighter has acted wrongly and his victim has been wronged. Compare, for example, a case in which a physician believes that her patient has a life-threatening bacterial infection in her leg on the basis of a usually reliable diagnostic test which is subject to an uncharacteristic error, and she decides to amputate. Even if the physician is responding appropriately to her evidence, given that the amputation is not in fact necessary, there is a sense in which she is acting wrongly in amputating her patient’s leg, and there is a sense in which her patient has been wronged by having her leg amputated. Her action may be excusable, but this does not make it right. In just the same way, I think that when a gaslighter has appropriate justification for his beliefs, his action might be excusable though it is wrong and harmful. In any case, it is worth remembering that very few cases of gaslighting involve gaslighters who have appropriate justification for their beliefs. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing me to clarify why unintentional gaslighting is morally wrong.
In her discussion of testimonial injustice, Fricker (2007, 22) argues that genuine testimonial injustice cannot result from an ethically innocent but epistemically culpable error, for example forming an unjustified and false view about a testifier’s credibility on the basis of a careless web search. This is because “an ethically non-culpable mistake cannot undermine or otherwise wrong the speaker” (2007, 22). Fricker’s position here may make sense for audience-centered concepts like testimonial injustice. When it comes to gaslighting, however, it seems clear that the victim of gaslighting can be wronged and undermined even if the perpetrator’s error is epistemic rather than ethical. It follows that even unintentional gaslighters can be culpable. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing me to clarify this point.
For an account of gaslighting stated in terms of justification simpliciter rather than knowledge-level justification, see Stark (2019).
Why might your veterinary acupuncturist make this claim even after learning that you have calculated $25? Perhaps he endorses steadfasting in cases of peer disagreement and is misguidedly attempting to share what he takes to be his knowledge with you.
It is worth pointing out in this connection that other accounts of gaslighting make similar predictions. For example: if, convinced of the correctness of his answer, your veterinary acupuncturist in [Bill]: intends (somewhat paternalistically) to gently convey to you that you lack basic epistemic competence in arithmetic, then he is gaslighting you according to Podosky’s account. Similarly, if he maintains his confidence in his answer after learning that you disagree in part because of identity prejudice, then he is gaslighting you according to Ivy’s account. So (Dilemmatic Gaslighting) is not alone in predicting that gaslighting can occur during disagreements involving perceptual or inferential justification in which both parties take themselves to be correct.
Some readers might disagree with me here, finding (Dilemmatic Gaslighting)’s verdicts about [Bird]: and [Bill]: quite counterintuitive. To them I once again offer the olive branch of conceptual pluralism about gaslighting. Perhaps we need more than one concept of gaslighting to account for the full range of our intuitions about cases. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing me to clarify the dialectical significance of [Bill]: and related cases.
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Acknowledgement
I am grateful to Kate Abramson, Emma Atherton, Ben Bronner, Robin Dembroff, Kenny Easwaran, Carolina Flores, Jeremy Goodman, Chris Hauser, Veronica Ivy, Kelsey Laity-D’Agostino, Jonathan Schaffer, Cynthia A. Stark, and two anonymous referees for Philosophical Studies for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. The ideas here also benefitted from discussion at the New York City Minorities and Philosophy Workshop Series in 2019 and the Pacific Meeting of the APA in 2021.
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Kirk-Giannini, C.D. Dilemmatic gaslighting. Philos Stud 180, 745–772 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01872-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01872-9