Rethinking the Rhetorical Epistemics of Gaslighting

Gaslighting is defined as a dysfunctional communication dynamic in which one interlocutor attempts to destabilize another’s sense of reality. In this article, we advance a model of gaslighting based in an epistemic rhetoric perspective. Our model directs attention to the rhetorics used to justify competing knowledge claims, as opposed to philosophical models that tend to rely on objective truth-value. We probe the discursive manifestations of gaslighting in logocentric, ethotic, or pathemic terms. We then apply our model to explain sexist and racist gaslighting that derives power from normatively instantiated discourses of rape culture and White supremacy. Specifically, our analysis identifies the appeal structures used to legitimate such gaslighting in response to disclosures of sexual violence and testimony about racial injustice.

Social-Epistemic Rhetoric of (Un)certainty in Biomedical and Psychiatric Scientific Academic Writing: a Diatextual Analysis

In line with the general aims of scientific textuality, research papers in the biomedical and psychiatric academic domains mostly attempt to demonstrate the validity of their assumptions and to contrast with the sense of uncertainty that sometimes frames their conclusions. Moving from this premise, the present paper aimed to focus on these features and to investigate if and the extent to which biomedical and psychiatric texts convey different social-epistemic rhetoric of uncertainty. In view of this, a qualitative study was conducted adopting diatextual analysis to investigate a corpus of 298 scientific articles taken from the British Medical Journal and from the British Journal of Psychiatry published in 2013. Our analytical approach led to identifying two different types of social-epistemic rhetoric. The first one was mostly oriented to “describing” the world, accounting for the body-mind nexus as conceptualized within the “medical” point of view. On the other hand, the second one was oriented to “interpreting” the world, debating the problematic and critical features of the body-mind relationship as developed within the psychiatry discursive realm.