This week's blogpost comes from Regina Fabry, a philosopher of mind and cognition and works as a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Discipline of Philosophy, School of Humanities at Macquarie University, Sydney. Her research currently focusses on self-narration, grief, human-technology interactions, and their intersections. In working on these topics, she brings together philosophical theorising on situated cognition and affectivity with feminist scholarship and research in literary and cultural studies, the empirical cognitive sciences, and AI.
Self-narration is an important part of our mental lives. The configuration and re-configuration of our personal past experiences – and our anticipated futures – in narrative form, many philosophers argue, can be conducive to self-knowledge and self-understanding. Furthermore, self-narratives are an important part of human sociality by facilitating collaborative modes of meaning-making. While self-narratives can take various shapes and forms, including autobiographies, memoirs, graphic novels, documentaries, and audio features, a particularly prevalent form of self-narration occurs in our everyday conversations with family members, friends, and colleagues.
Conversational self-narration is realised by the co-present, embodied, and interactive conversational exchange of a self-narrator and one or more interlocutors. They make significant contributions, to varying degrees, to the process of self-narration and the form and content of the resulting self-narratives. Interlocutors make their contributions through their linguistic engagement with the self-narrator. They often ask questions, offer comments, request or contribute elaborations, make exclamations, and express agreement or disagreement with what has been said. Furthermore, interlocutors shape the conversational self-narrational exchange through their paralinguistic contributions, for example their posture, gestures, facial expressions, or gaze.
Until very recently, research on self-narration that is committed to a situated view of human cognition and affectivity has focused on cases in which self-narrators benefit from the conversational contributions of their interlocutors. More generally, this one-sided emphasis on the beneficial effects – and a neglect of the (potentially) harmful consequences – of our interactions with the socio-culturally shaped environment has been termed the harmony bias or the dogma of harmony. To overcome a one-sided and hopelessly incomplete understanding of the social dynamics of conversational self-narration, it is important to look at cases in which interlocutors wrongfully harm other agents by maliciously interfering with their self-narration.
In an article that was published in Philosophical Psychology in June 2024, I start to overcome the harmony bias in research on situated self-narration by considering cases of narrative gaslighting. The phenomenon of gaslighting has received widespread philosophical attention in recent years. To a first approximation, gaslighting can be defined as a temporally extended conversational process that seeks to erode and ultimately destroy an agent’s standing as somebody who is able to interpret and evaluate their own experiences in an epistemically and morally competent manner.
Not all cases of gaslighting occur in the context of conversational self-narration, but many of them do, so that a proper analysis of the phenomenon I call narrative gaslighting is warranted. In cases of narrative gaslighting, the perpetrator interferes with the target’s attempt to narrativize – and thereby interpret and evaluate – selected components of their own personal past. This malicious interference, I propose, can take on three different, analytically distinct forms. Yet, in practice, these forms often co-occur and mutually reinforce each other.
First, in cases of mnemonic interference, the perpetrator interferes with the target’s sense of being an epistemic agent who is able to recall, with a certain level accuracy, key aspects of their autobiographical memories that find entry into their self-narrative. Second, in cases of interpretational interference, the target is depicted as an unreliable, untrustworthy self-narrator who is unable to interpret their personal past experiences by giving them narrative form. Finally, conceptual interference consists in the recurrent undermining of the target’s competence to categorise and label a narrativized sequence of events by using concepts (e.g., ‘sexual harassment’).
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| Regina Fabry |
Self-narration is an important part of our mental lives. The configuration and re-configuration of our personal past experiences – and our anticipated futures – in narrative form, many philosophers argue, can be conducive to self-knowledge and self-understanding. Furthermore, self-narratives are an important part of human sociality by facilitating collaborative modes of meaning-making. While self-narratives can take various shapes and forms, including autobiographies, memoirs, graphic novels, documentaries, and audio features, a particularly prevalent form of self-narration occurs in our everyday conversations with family members, friends, and colleagues.
Conversational self-narration is realised by the co-present, embodied, and interactive conversational exchange of a self-narrator and one or more interlocutors. They make significant contributions, to varying degrees, to the process of self-narration and the form and content of the resulting self-narratives. Interlocutors make their contributions through their linguistic engagement with the self-narrator. They often ask questions, offer comments, request or contribute elaborations, make exclamations, and express agreement or disagreement with what has been said. Furthermore, interlocutors shape the conversational self-narrational exchange through their paralinguistic contributions, for example their posture, gestures, facial expressions, or gaze.
Until very recently, research on self-narration that is committed to a situated view of human cognition and affectivity has focused on cases in which self-narrators benefit from the conversational contributions of their interlocutors. More generally, this one-sided emphasis on the beneficial effects – and a neglect of the (potentially) harmful consequences – of our interactions with the socio-culturally shaped environment has been termed the harmony bias or the dogma of harmony. To overcome a one-sided and hopelessly incomplete understanding of the social dynamics of conversational self-narration, it is important to look at cases in which interlocutors wrongfully harm other agents by maliciously interfering with their self-narration.
In an article that was published in Philosophical Psychology in June 2024, I start to overcome the harmony bias in research on situated self-narration by considering cases of narrative gaslighting. The phenomenon of gaslighting has received widespread philosophical attention in recent years. To a first approximation, gaslighting can be defined as a temporally extended conversational process that seeks to erode and ultimately destroy an agent’s standing as somebody who is able to interpret and evaluate their own experiences in an epistemically and morally competent manner.
Not all cases of gaslighting occur in the context of conversational self-narration, but many of them do, so that a proper analysis of the phenomenon I call narrative gaslighting is warranted. In cases of narrative gaslighting, the perpetrator interferes with the target’s attempt to narrativize – and thereby interpret and evaluate – selected components of their own personal past. This malicious interference, I propose, can take on three different, analytically distinct forms. Yet, in practice, these forms often co-occur and mutually reinforce each other.
First, in cases of mnemonic interference, the perpetrator interferes with the target’s sense of being an epistemic agent who is able to recall, with a certain level accuracy, key aspects of their autobiographical memories that find entry into their self-narrative. Second, in cases of interpretational interference, the target is depicted as an unreliable, untrustworthy self-narrator who is unable to interpret their personal past experiences by giving them narrative form. Finally, conceptual interference consists in the recurrent undermining of the target’s competence to categorise and label a narrativized sequence of events by using concepts (e.g., ‘sexual harassment’).
All forms of interference are manifested through various linguistic means, for example by raising rhetorical questions (“Are you sure this really happened?!”) and making exclamations (“You don’t know what you are talking about!”). Furthermore, malicious linguistic utterances are often accompanied by paralinguistic expressions, for example eye-rolling or frowning.
Across time, narrative gaslighting threatens to undermine the target’s sense of their epistemic and moral competence. If this temporally extended process “succeeds” (from the perspective of the perpetrator), the target will no longer feel confident that they have the competence and authority to remember, interpret, and conceptualise their very own personal past experiences through acts of self-narration.
The upshot is an account that goes some way towards mitigating the harmony bias in research on situated self-narration. Furthermore, narrative gaslighting is an important phenomenon in its own right, which deserves further consideration and scrutiny in future research.