When ordinary people think of violence, they think of things like bombs exploding, gunfire, and brawls. Most dictionary definitions of “violence” mention physical harm or force. Academics, ignoring common usage, speak of “administrative violence,” “data violence,” “epistemic violence” and other heretofore unknown forms of violence. Philosopher Kristie Dotson defines the last of these as follows: “Epistemic violence in testimony is a refusal, intentional or unintentional, of an audience to communicatively reciprocate a linguistic exchange owing to pernicious ignorance.”
What Dotson calls “epistemic violence” isn’t violence according to ordinary usage or the dictionary. If intellectuals can commandeer the word “violence,” then presumably they can do the same with stronger words. So why not call epistemic violence “epistemic rape”? Indeed, why not “epistemic genocide”? After all, genocide is destroying a people in whole or in part, and part of destroying a people is destroying its voice. Maybe that can be done through subtle acts of silencing. This is absurd, of course, but there’s no principled way to stop moves like this if we accept coinages like “epistemic violence.”
The word “gaslighting” has also been abused in this way. The term originated with Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play, Gas Light, which was later adapted into movies in Britain and the United States, both named Gaslight. The plot centers around a woman who begins to lose her grip on reality because of her husband’s pathological lying. According to Dictionary.com, to “gaslight” someone is: “to cause (a person) to doubt his or her sanity through the use of psychological manipulation.” Gaslighting is characterized by pervasive, blatant lying. The perpetrator might confidently deny that the victim heard him say something that he clearly said moments ago.
Some intellectuals define “gaslighting” so loosely that it need not involve outright lying; this way, speech they dislike can be called “gaslighting.” Two professors of political science at Seattle University write: “Just as the process of white supremacy does not require those who are complicit to understand the racist nature of their actions, awareness is also not determinative of whether the process of racial gaslighting is taking place.”2 Examples of racial gaslighting, according to them, include dominant groups “tone policing” minorities who have every right to be angry about their oppression and—apparently—expressing any conservative opinion about race.
Philosopher Rachel McKinnon also does this. After accurately describing how the word “gaslighting” entered the language and what it is usually taken to mean, she writes:
However, this isn’t the kind of gaslighting I am interested in for the purposes of this chapter. Instead, I’m interested in the more subtle form, often unintentional, where a listener doesn’t believe, or expresses doubts about, a speaker’s testimony. In this epistemic form of gaslighting, the listener of testimony [sic] expresses doubts about the speaker’s reliability at perceiving events accurately.
McKinnon presents the following as a case of such “subtle” gaslighting. A trans woman, Victoria, thinks that James is deliberately failing to use her preferred pronouns, and pronounce her name correctly, in order to demean her. Her colleague, Susan, doubts this interpretation and suggests Victoria might be too emotional and primed to hear verbal slights (consistent with a stereotype about trans women). This denial of Victoria’s authoritative perspective supposedly renders Susan a gaslighter. Of course, since we all get things like this wrong, Susan might be doing the right thing by offering a different point of view. Even if Susan is misguided, her words are no more a subtle form of gaslighting than a wasp is a subtle form of wolf, or an insult is a subtle form of murder.
Because “gaslighting” is a label for a kind of bad behavior that has no other convenient designation, inflating this word’s meaning hampers our ability to communicate. Words that are abused in the way that “violence” and “gaslighting” are being abused cannot even be useful rhetorical tools for very long, since their negative associations depend upon the meanings they have prior to these manipulations. At some point, new words will need to be inflated to replace the uselessly inflated terms. Thus, semantic activists must continually comb the land in search of emotionally impactful words to be harvested, then left behind as desiccated semantic husks.