I spoke with Andrew Spear, a Philosophy lecturer at Grand Valley State University, Michigan.
Andrew has published an academic article focusing on the link between gaslighting and confabulation, whilst analysing his own research into understanding the effects of this form of abuse.
The below is taken from Andrew's abstract on his study.
I consider the role of confabulation in typical cases of interpersonal gaslighting, and argue that confabulation will not be epistemically innocent in such cases even if it does preserve a coherent self-concept or belief-set for the subject. Analyzing the role of confabulation in gaslighting illustrates its role in on-going interpersonal relationships, and augments already growing evidence that confabulation may be quite widespread. The role of confabulation in gaslighting shows that whether confabulation confers epistemic benefits (and so is epistemically innocent) will depend greatly on the interpersonal context in which it is deployed, while whether a coherent self-concept is epistemically beneficial will depend to a great extent on the content of that self-concept. This shows that the notion of an epistemically harmful or beneficial feature of a cognitive process can and should be further clarified, and that doing so has both theoretical and practical advantages in understanding epistemic innocence itself.
I found my discussion with Andrew eye opening and I will be posting a preview of the interview very soon.
Further reading of Andrew's work can be found here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11245-018-9611-z
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