Eleanor March (Oxford), '"I Must be Imagining This." On the Possibility of Self-Gaslighting'

The phenomenon of self-gaslighting can be puzzling to understand from the received theory of gaslighting, which centrally involves intentional manipulation (Abramson 2014, 2024). In self-gaslighting, a subject starts out with a certain belief but, due to social environmental factors, questions her perception, memories, and judgments related to the original belief. But it would be strange to say that the subject intentionally manipulates herself into self-doubt. In this paper, we first provide a new definition of gaslighting that does not require active manipulation, by connecting it to the epistemic injustice involved. We then argue that self-gaslighting is possible because it involves a higher-order epistemic injustice we call perspectival injustice. A subject self-gaslights when she feels pressured to switch to a dominant hermeneutical framework that is inapt in evaluating her belief, making her belief appear unsupported.