Hermeneutical Disarmament

Hermeneutical Disarmament: How language change can undermine understanding and communication

Words and phrases enable us to understand the world and our experiences. In Epistemic Injustice, Miranda Fricker reports Wendy Sanford’s experience of depression following the birth of her child in the 1960s. Without a word to name her experience, Sanford thought that she was guilty of a “personal deficiency”. Upon learning the term postpartum depression at a workshop, Sanford’s perspective radically changed; she recognised what she was going through as a medical condition.

Changing meanings

However, words and phrases often change their meaning. Gaslighting refers to a kind of abuse in which one person causes another to doubt their own experiences. In Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play Gas Light, Jack persuades his wife Bella that she cannot trust her perception or memory; when he takes a painting down from the wall and dims the gas lights, Jack convinces Bella that she is imagining these changes, giving him control over her. More recently, however, gaslighting is used to refer generally to lying or manipulating.

Taking these observations together reveals a problem. Words and phrases help us to understand and communicate about the world and our experiences of it. But the meaning of these words and phrases can change. When this happens, we might lose the words that we need to understand or communicate about whatever it is we want to understand or communicate about. I call this hermeneutical disarmament.

Hermeneutical disarmament

Hermeneutical disarmament: “the process by which a person is rendered less able to understand or communicate experiences, ideas, and other phenomena as a result of semantic change to the linguistic term (word or phrase) that could previously have been deployed for these purposes.” (Morgan 2025: 1076)

When the words we use change their meaning, this can leave us less able to understand and communicate about the original meaning of these words. It is clearly useful for victims of abusive manipulation (and their support network) to have a widely understood term, gaslighting, for this specific kind of psychological abuse. It helps them to understand what the victim is going through, aid existing victims, and reduce the likelihood of future victimisation. If this term disappears, because gaslighting comes to mean simply lying, then a useful tool is lost.

Words naming medical conditions can be similarly useful tools. Without the term postpartum depression, Sanford might have been unable to access relevant support and continued, mistakenly, to view her condition as a person failing.

In other cases, there is a risk that the misuse of medical terms might lead to changes in their meaning, depriving us of useful terminology. Some speakers use OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) to describe a particular care for cleanliness or organisation (“My flatmate is driving me crazy; she’s so OCD!”), rather than obsessions and compulsive behaviours that would warrant clinical intervention. Someone might say that they are depressed when they are feeling sad, even when they do not suffer from the often-debilitating psychological condition by this name.

When used literally, these terms serve as useful tools for people experiencing the relevant condition and those around them. They enable a person to understand what they are going through (just as postpartum depression assisted Wendy Sanford), explain this to others, and secure relevant accommodations in work and education. 

When these terms are (mis-)used to refer to something other than the medical condition in question, there is the risk that, over time, these alternative meanings might dominate, so that we lose generally understood phrases for the medical conditions. This would deprive people who suffer from these conditions and those around them of a useful tool for understanding and communicating. So, there is a risk that changes to the meaning of medical terms might inflict hermeneutical disarmament on those who experience these conditions.

Photo credit: Dustin Smith, Skywall Photography

Robert Morgan is a Lecturer and Consultant at IDEA: The Ethics Centre, University of Leeds, teaching mostly at the SWJTU-Leeds Joint School in Chengdu and at Centres for Doctoral Training around the UK. Robert’s research primarily focuses on applied sexual ethics, although he also works on topics in epistemology and metaphysics as these bear on how persons relate to each other. He is currently working on what it means for one person to touch another through something such as clothing (with Will Hornett), and on the value of interpersonal sexual activity.

 

Narrative Deference

This blog post is a write-up of a paper by project postdoc Ellie Byrne which was published in Topoi in September as part of a special issue entitled Scaffolding Bad: Varieties of Situated Cognitive Harm edited by David Spurrett, Giovanna Colombetti and John Sutton. 

When I worked on the project Grief: A Study of Human Emotional Experience (PI Matthew Ratcliffe) at York, we obtained hundreds of first-person testimonies from grieving people about their experiences. I think regularly about some of the things people wrote, but there’s one in particular I keep coming back to: “My childhood is now only remembered by me. I’m an only child. So that time seems completely inaccessible.” (#208)

To me, this quote drew attention to the extent to which having other people available to corroborate our memories influences how we understand ourselves. We do this all the time and all throughout our lives: we might ask our parents to corroborate some significant childhood experience of ours, or ask a sibling to confirm that we’ve remembered something correctly. Later in life, we may ask a friend to corroborate how we remember coping with a breakup or our partner to remind us of a certain order of events in a particularly busy period.

We also enlist others to fill in the gaps for things we do not remember well. We might not really remember much at all about these experiences; perhaps just diffuse ‘feelings’ associated with certain events. In such cases, we might end up pretty reliant on our friends, family and partners to tell us what happened, how we felt about what happened and how those feelings have shaped who we are today.

According to the philosopher Richard Heersmink, autobiographical memories are the building blocks of our autobiographical self-narratives. Heersmink, situating some of his work within the field of ‘distributed cognition’, has emphasised that since our memories are distributed between people, it makes sense to say that our self-narratives are too. In my paper, I followed Heersmink in drawing attention to the extent to which we can rely on others for our autobiographical self-narratives, and the ways that this can be both good and bad for us. My paper introduces a concept which I call ‘narrative deference’, defined as the phenomenon whereby one is more dependent upon another person for central aspects of one’s autobiographical self-narrative than on oneself.

As I started to present this idea at conferences and workshops, there was a consistent theme in Q&A discussions: each time, multiple people in the audience had thought of contexts in which this phenomenon is harmful. This led me to think about the phenomenon in terms of another one of my research interests: affective injustice.

Affective injustice scholar Shiloh Whitney connects affective injustice to a distinctively affective form of gaslighting, the phenomena whereby casting doubt on someone is the means through which they are made to doubt themselves: “in gaslighting, the way others respond to me begins to impair an aspect of my relationship to myself. In particular, the noncooperative response I receive from some second person(s) when I express my experiences to them begins to impair some aspect of my ability to make sense of my own experience to myself in the first person” (Whitney 2023, pp.31–32). 

Understood this way, we can see how the affective influence others have on us can be used to undermine our self-trust over time such that our autobiographical self-narrative possibilities are restricted. While gaslighting is primarily discussed in the context of romantic relationships, it is being increasingly recognised how gaslighting can also occur in healthcare settings.

In a variety of contexts, an ill person might narratively defer to another because it presents itself as the best immediate option. Perhaps narratively deferring to my parents allows me to maintain a coherent or desirable autobiographical self-narrative. Perhaps deferring to my doctor allows me to make sense of an otherwise overwhelming and confusing situation. Perhaps deferring to my partner prevents conflict and maintains my bond with the person who cares for me. This deference can surely help me to secure lots of things that are good for me, but my most fundamental sense of self is also made vulnerable by it.

I think there is a lot of interesting and important future work to be done in exploring how this phenomenon operates in both epistemic and affective injustices in healthcare.

Eleanor Byrne

Eleanor is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Birmingham and part of Project EPIC. She specialises in affective and existential dimensions of illness experiences, particularly Functional Neurological Disorders. She has worked on grief in illness and experiences of post-viral fatigue such as Long Covid. She is currently developing a project on phenomenology and functional seizures.