Cynthia Stark
Professor
University of Utah
Varieties of Gaslighting
This essay defends an account of gaslighting as constituted by the following: 1) the target of the gaslighting T holds a view V, 2) T's holding V is at least minimally justified, 3) the gaslighter G denies V and tries to get T to adopt his competing not even minimally justified view, typically ~V, 4) G’s denial of V is founded on the claim that T holds V only due to a personal defect that prevents T from seeing the truth, 5) G is not even minimally justified in believing that T's holding V is explained by that non-truth-conducive defect. I arrive at this characterization by examining three paradigm cases of gaslighting and determining their shared features. I then show that my approach captures two recent accounts of structural gaslighting.