I have regularly complained about misuse of the term “gaslighting.” Gaslighting is a form of abuse in which a person you trust manipulates you into distrusting your own perceptions, memories, and judgments.
Unfortunately, the Internet has decided that instead “gaslighting” should be used as a synonym for concepts like “lying” or, in particularly irritating cases, “disagreeing with me.” As someone who was abused by gaslighting, I find this incredibly upsetting.
It is not gaslighting when someone contradicts you, or intentionally causes you to doubt your beliefs, or leaves you uncertain of what you believe, or even makes you think that they think you are crazy. Gaslighting is about someone lying to you in a way that causes you to lose trust in your own capabilities as a rational person: your ability to reason, your competence to figure out the truth, your capacity to remember things in a broadly accurate fashion even if you are sometimes fuzzy on details, your knowledge of your own feelings and thoughts and desires. And if your mind is unreliable… well, you’ll have to rely on someone else.
Gaslighting is already confusing and difficult to identify by its very nature, even when people haven’t decided to make the only word we have to refer to this very important concept mean “lying, but like I’m really upset about it.” If “gaslighting” refers to “lying,” it is difficult for people to name their abuse and recognize that what is happening to them is wrong.
(Honestly, using “gaslighting” to refer to someone disagreeing with you is itself kind of gaslight-y. Might want to check that out.)
Many people who want to misuse the term “gaslighting” should just suck it up and use a phrase like “blatantly lying” instead. However, I think sometimes people are gesturing for a concept that really isn’t covered by words like ‘lying.’ They’re gesturing for something structural, a harm done by society rather than by an individual; they’re gesturing for something oppressive, a dynamic related to their presence in a marginalized group; they’re gesturing for something that causes harm to your ability to reason and come to conclusions and trust your own self-knowledge, similarly to how gaslighting does, even if less severe and not perpetuated by a person.
In the name of not striking terms from others’ vocabulary without suitable replacement, I would like to suggest an alternative: hermeneutical injustice.
Hermeneutical injustice is a term invented by philosopher Miranda Fricker in her book Epistemic Injustice. Hermeneutical injustice is the harm caused to a person when they have an experience, but do not have the concepts or frameworks they need to make sense of what their experience is. For example, a man who falls in love with a man, in a society where homosexuality is conceived of as a disgusting perversion with no true affection or love in it, experiences a hermeneutical injustice. A woman whose boss keeps plausibly-deniably touching her breasts and telling her that she has a great ass, before the invention of the concept of sexual harassment, experiences a hermeneutical injustice. A man forced into sex who has no concept that men can be raped experiences a hermeneutical injustice.
(Of course, not all cases of hermeneutical injustice are related to a social justice topic: trypophobes of the world suffered a minor hermeneutical injustice before we had a cultural understanding that, for some people, that particular pattern of holes is just horrible.)
The primary harm of hermeneutical injustice is, of course, that you can’t express your feelings or experiences. If you don’t have the concept of “transness” or “sexual harassment” or “misophonia,” you are going to sound like an idiot when you try to explain why something hurts you.
You: “That sound is just BAD, okay. It makes me want to KILL SOMEONE. I want to STAB OUT MY EARDRUMS.”
Them: “This is a kind of unreasonable reaction to forks scraping against a plate. Why do you feel that way?”
You: “I don’t KNOW it just SUCKS.”
Them: “Well, are you sure you’re not just exaggerating?”
You: “AARRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGH.”
Hermeneutical injustice also makes it harder to understand your own experiences. If you don’t have the concept of gender dysphoria, it’s hard to put together your body image issues, your depersonalization, your deep-seated jealousy of women, your desire to wear skirts, and the fact that you never play a male RPG character. Those will all seem like discrete unrelated facts that don’t point to anything.
But the harms of hermeneutical injustice go deeper. There are harms to the individual as a knower: you feel stupid or crazy because you can’t articulate your experiences, and that makes you feel stupid and crazy in general; it is hard to cultivate certain epistemic virtues if you can’t understand yourself and your own mind. And quite often– especially in more serious cases of hermeneutical injustice– there is a harm to your identity. The harm of growing up conceptualizing yourself as a sodomite rather than a gay person; the harm of thinking of yourself as a person who freaks out about normal flirtation instead of a victim of sexual harassment; the harm of having your very sense of self shaped by narratives and concepts that were developed by people who don’t understand people like you at all.
And if you’re harmed by hermeneutical injustice– if the concepts and narratives available don’t describe your experiences, and this makes you feel stupid and crazy and hysterical, and you internalize as descriptions of yourself statements that aren’t true because you don’t have a way of saying the things that are true— well, you might reach for the word “gaslighting” to describe the way it makes you feel. As a way of expressing that this is a very serious harm, that it’s driving you crazy, that your problem is not just lying or disagreement but something more fundamental.
And if you’re in that situation, I hope this essay resolved that piece of hermeneutical injustice, and therefore you can stop perpetuating hermeneutical injustice against me.
Thing of Things 
What are some specific situations in which you’d want to substitute “hermeneutical injustice” for “gaslighting”?
(This is a really really useful concept and I hope it catches on and I definitely already have situations in mind in which I want to use it, but they aren’t situations I would otherwise have described as “gaslighting” and I’m having trouble picturing situations where the substitution makes sense.)
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This is a good concept! However I believe it might be common than you think for someone on the receiving end of a hermeneutical injustice, or some other kind of strong emotional pain, to continue to believe themselves to be gaslit.
I have some strong visceral beliefs that include a strongly felt belief that it is impossible to feel otherwise. Cognitively I “understand” that feeling otherwise is possible and common, but by their nature these beliefs are stronger than mere cognitions.
Over time, the conflict between these deep beliefs and the “saner” parts of my mind is decreasing, but the introduction of a cognitive concept that captures the situation doesn’t have a big effect on that.
Anyway I don’t seem to be actually disagreeing with anything you said, I just wanted to point out a reason why this concept will not get rid of people saying they are being gaslit…
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Hermeneutical injustice is actually one of the major ways in which the less educated and/or less intelligent are oppressed. Although I would take the concept further, because it’s not just about being able to express your desires and experiences, but especially about expressing them in a way that people will see as legitimate.
A major part of the power struggle between people involves legitimizing certain concerns and even more so, getting their own desires perceived as being consistent with these legitimate concerns, but not with illegitimate concerns. The opposite also commonly happens, where people try to portray the desires and even experiences of others as illegitimate.
For example, free trade both increases average incomes, but also income inequality. Yet proponents pretty universally only point out the former, as that is legitimate, while increasing income inequality is considered illegitimate.
Similarly, personal needs are typically considered less legitimate than needs of a greater group, so people commonly pretend to fight for benefits for others, when they really want those for themselves.
It is common for these deceptions to be fully internalized and thus not intentional lying, although the dishonesty often manifests itself in behaviors and demands that are illogical if the professed arguments would be the (sole) motivations of the person.
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These are just some possible emotions. I primarily get angry and feel rejected, because the inability to express certain things and the bad responses that make me unwilling to express other things, is not merely a result of lacking concepts and narratives, but in large part due to their vilification (and thus vilification of me).
Is that even possible? Aren’t hermeneutical injustices an inescapable part of any ideology that is dumbed down and simplified sufficiently to actually be usable?
If you don’t perceive hermeneutical injustices being done to you, doesn’t that simply mean that you’ve adopted or constructed an extremely unjust ideology that provides you with all the hermeneutical benefits and others with all the hermeneutical costs?
PS. Also, some things don’t make sense. People often adopt false explanations that satisfy their desire for the world to not be as it is. A more overt example is superstitions. So many people can achieve a feeling of hermeneutical justices by believing a lie.
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So what would the verb be? “I’ve been hermeneutically injusticed”? Injustified?
I know I’ve run up against lexical gaps a few times…
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@angiportus, I like “wronged”.
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Hmm. That concept, and all of the examples given, sound much more simply about ignorance than about injustice.
Injustice implies a wrong-doer, someone to blame. But ignorance does not – it’s simply the default state of all people, it’s a brute fact coming from the universe.
Injustice and ignorance have very different solutions. The person who just doesn’t know that misophonia or transgender are real things doesn’t need to find a wrong-doer to blame and punish, they just need to learn about misophonia or transgender.
And we already have perfectly good vocabulary about ignorance. It’s very easy to say that Alice doesn’t know about misophonia, or that Bob was confused about transgender. I don’t think it’s a good idea to frame those things as “injustice”, because that framing will lead to an ineffective blame response, rather than to an effective learning response.
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I think you are missing the distinction being made here. *Ignorance* is a problem that can be solved with, say, an educational article about misophonia. But if *no one* has the concept of misophonia– if we’re entirely missing the concept that some people are disproportionately enraged by certain sounds– you can’t write an educational article because there do not exist any people capable of writing the article. And if society is disproportionately unlikely to have concepts to describe certain people’s experiences– women, LGBTQ people, disabled people– this is worth discussing separately from widespread ignorance. (As just one example of the difference, even if all straight people are ignorant of LGBTQ people, if the concepts exist the LGBTQ people can research it themselves– which is not possible in a situation of hermeneutical injustice.)
I highly recommend you read Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Justice, which has a long and IMO persuasive discussion of why epistemic injustice is a form of injustice. I can’t do justice (so to speak) to it in a comment.
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No. Just, no. We absolutely should have a “blame response”. Hermeneutic injustice is a prison and the appropriate concept is a key to the lock, but the barriers are made of something and were put there on purpose. “Conforming to cishet gender roles is very important” or “complaining about small noises means you are just whining”. Many assholes continue making these arguments – trying to arrest us again – even after the victims have articulated the concepts of LGBTQ identities or misophonia. Ignorant people who are enlightened and relieved, good for them. We can use mild terns of ignorance about them and reserve injustice for real, active, common, deliberate injustice.
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I get where you’re coming from here. As a car wreck survivor who went through years of flashbacks whenever I, for example, smelled petrol, hearing people use ‘trigger’ to refer to any stimulus that provokes a response they don’t want to take responsibility for gets my back up.
But depending on your experiences and sensitivities these sorts of problems are rife.
When I was a kid ‘autistic’ was only applied to very disabled people with complex support needs and severely impaired verbal skills. How do you suppose carers for people like that feel when they hear people like us refer to ourselves as ‘autistic’?
There’s no English language equivalent to L’Académie française. English is defined by its usage, nothing else. Dictionaries must bow to speakers, not the other way around. And yeah, put a term into popular circulation and it will mutate, blur and lose precision. This is especially true of pop psychology terms. Maybe a better strategy would be to find another way to refer to what happened to you and leave ‘gaslighting’ to the mob.
(Disclosure: Diagnosed with Asperger’s in the 80s. I didn’t bother to check whether I meet DSM-5 criteria for ASD after they abolished Asperger’s.)
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