This paper presents an analytical framework modeling the operational mechanics of gaslighting by synthesizing the philosophical foundations of epistemic injustice and Wittgensteinian certainty with a two-stage cognitive processing architecture. While contemporary scholarship has aligned gaslighting with the destabilization of a subject's world picture (Trächtler 2023), this paper isolates the sequential progression of the injury. The paper argues that epistemic sabotage operates via a structured cognitive sequence: first corrupting the subject's phenomenology (the pre-reflective input layer of raw sensory experience) to engineer a catastrophic vulnerability, which is subsequently leveraged to execute a total erasure of the agent's ontology (the linguistic and semantic categories permitted to populate reality). Crucially, we formalize the existential engine of this collapse by introducing the Affective-Logical Weight Balance (WL vs. WA). We demonstrate how the hyper-inflation of relational and existential stakes forces the agent to suppress their own logical shield, pulling them off the firm bedrock of certainty and trapping them within a recursive Cartesian Loop of Despair. By shifting the analytical focus from a holistic description of the injury to a granular decomposition of its sequential entry points and internal emotional economy, this maps how a gaslighter exploits an agent's rational virtues to establish absolute ontological corruption, while providing a philosophical structural blueprint for systemic, externalized epistemic recovery. Figures, matrices, architectural diagrams, and language polishing assisted by Gemini (Google AI).
Roopesh Kumar Singh (Sat,) studied this question.
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