Gaslighting and Epistemic Competence

Abstract

Anti-intentionalist, purely epistemic accounts of gaslighting that center its dilemmatic structure have a range of attractive features. However, they appear to face an overgeneration problem: if there is no more to gaslighting than the perpetrator forcing his victim to choose between accepting his testimony and doubting her own epistemic competence, many ordinary cases of disagreement may counterintuitively count as gaslighting. In earlier work, I sought to solve this problem in part by holding that gaslighting must target a victim’s basic epistemic competence in some domain. In a recent article, Hill shows that restricting gaslighting to basic epistemic competences in this way rules out too many cases, resulting in an undergeneration problem. I reply to Hill here, arguing that restricting gaslighting to basic epistemic competences is not in fact necessary to address the threat of overgeneration.