Abstract
AbstractPost-truth politics has been diagnosed as harmful to both knowledge and democracy. I argue that it can also fundamentally undermine epistemic autonomy in a way that is similar to the manipulative technique known as gaslighting. Using examples from contemporary politics, I identify three categories of post-truth rhetoric: the introduction of counternarratives, the discrediting of critics, and the denial of more or less plain facts. These strategies tend to isolate people epistemically, leaving them disoriented and unable to distinguish between reliable and unreliable sources. Like gaslighting, post-truth politics aims to undermine epistemic autonomy by eroding someone's self-trust, in order to consolidate power. Shifting the focus to the effects on the victim allows for new insights into the specific harms of post-truth politics. Applying the concept of gaslighting to this domain may also help people recognize a pernicious dynamic that was invisible to them before, giving them an important tool to resist it.
Highlights
Ever since “post-truth” was elected as word of the year 2016, journalists, social scientists and philosophers have sought to understand the nature and dangers of the phenomenon this term refers to
Some have pointed to its negative effects on our knowledge (Levy 2017), others have connected it to Frankfurtian bullshit (Davies 2017), and still others have warned that post-truth rhetoric is detrimental to democracy (Fish 2016; Suiter 2016)
Though it has been argued that the term “post-truth” is ambiguous and misleading (Habgood-Coote 2019), the factual existence of political discourses that exhibit a lack of concern for facts and expertise is undeniable – and epistemically problematic
Summary
The term “gaslighting” is derived from the 1938 Patrick Hamilton play Gas Light and its two film adaptations, in which a Victorian husband attempts to have his wife diagnosed as mentally ill and taken away to an asylum so that he can obtain her fortune. Zagzebski says that a loss of general self-trust “would threaten to destroy the self” (2012: 62n8) and on Spear’s account, this means a victim is “no longer able to meaningfully go forward as an [epistemic] agent” (2019: 17). While none of them are necessary for gaslighting, they form a mutually reinforcing set of strategies and their combined use in ascending order of severity is what makes the gaslighting in Gaslight effective There is another important factor in gaslighting contributing to its effectiveness: the victim trusts their manipulator and/or depends on them in some way (Abramson 2014: 19–20). It is perhaps unsurprising that some politicians have started implementing gaslighting techniques
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