Autism, aspect-perception, and neurodiversity

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the appeal, made by some philosophers, to Wittgenstein’s notion of aspect-blindness in order to better understand autistic perception and social cognition. I articulate and assess different ways of understanding what it means to say that autists are aspect-blind. While more attention to the perceptual dimensions of autism is a welcome development in philosophical explorations of the condition, I argue that there are significant problems with attributing aspect-blindness to autists. The empirical basis for the attribution of aspect-blindness to autists is questionable, but, even if it turns out that future empirical work on autistic perception and social cognition decisively supports the attribution of some forms of aspect-blindness to autists, the descriptive and explanatory fruitfulness of the notion of aspect-blindness is limited in important ways. To better capture autistic experience, we should broaden our framework to include conceptualizing autists as engaging in forms of aspect-perception.

KEYWORDS:

• Seeing aspects
• aspect-blindness
• Wittgenstein
• autism
• neurodiversity

Acknowledgments

I am greatly indebted to Nameera Akhtar, Jonathan Ellis, Caitlin Hamblin-Yule, Gurpreet Rattan, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on prior drafts of this paper. Parts of it were presented to the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Iceland and the philosophy departments at the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto. I am grateful to participants for their feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The duck-rabbit figure appears in Joseph Jastrow’s Fact and Fable in Psychology (Jastrow, 1900). It was Wittgenstein’s use of it, however, that drew considerable philosophical attention. Many contemporary discussions of aspect-perception trace back to Wittgenstein’s remarks about the duck-rabbit figure and related phenomena, as they are found in Philosophical Investigations (hereafter PI), “Wittgenstein, 1967, 1980b, 1980c, 2009a, and 2009b. The duck-rabbit in particular appears at in Wittgenstein, 2009b, 118.

2. The relevant phenomena extend beyond the visual modality to the auditory modality and perhaps to other modalities as well (e.g. the tactile).

3. The overview of aspect-perception provided here is merely a meager sampling of the relevant concepts and phenomena. It is not intended to provide a representative, let alone exhaustive, taxonomy of the many kinds of experiences and possible experiences one might call “aspect-perception.”

4. Wittgenstein, 2009b, §222.

5. Wittgenstein, 1980c, §510.

6. Wittgenstein, 1980b, §1036.

7. Ibid., §997.

8. Wittgenstein, 2009a, §200c.

9. Wittgenstein, 2009b, §233.

10. Notice that all these construals are committed to the idea that autists are “blind” to the angry facial expression or to the joyfulness in a voice, for example, even though their eyesight and hearing are not defective. Two presuppositions underlie this claim. I note them but do not assess them here. The first is that (at least some) psychological phenomena can be perceived in face-to-face social encounters and that, ordinarily, people do perceive such phenomena. The second concerns the relation between perceiving emotional expressions and aspect-perception, namely, that perceiving emotional expressions is a kind of aspect-perception and, correspondingly, that the inability to perceive these expressions is a form of aspect-blindness. Both presuppositions are contentious. Regarding the first presupposition, there is much theoretical debate concerning how best to describe and explain how we come to understand others’ mental states (e.g. through inference, perception, or both) and whether and how our mental attributions (e.g. “Sarah is angry,” “Bob wants more coffee”) are justified (e.g. inferentially or non-inferentially). A common line of thought in both philosophy and psychology is that to access other minds, humans have to infer unobservable mental states from overt behavior, which is observable and thus perceptible. Recently, however, the idea that at least some of our access to other minds is perceptual has begun to receive serious consideration and theoretical attention. Proponents of perceptual models claim that we can, at least in some cases, immediately perceive the mental states of other people. See Gallagher (2004) and Krueger and Overgaard (2012), for example. Regarding the second presupposition, this is an under-theorized topic, one that tends to be taken up in the context of Wittgenstein interpretation, and here interpreters disagree whether Wittgenstein holds that psychological concepts (e.g. ‘sadness,’ ‘joyfulness,’ ‘timidity’) are aspect concepts. For discussion, see Mulhall (1990) and Baz (2000), who challenges Mulhall’s interpretation.

11. Stawarska (2010), p. 273.

12. Ibid., p. 274.

13. See Overgaard (2006), Footnote 12, p. 70, for example.

14. This characterization, found in Bax (2009), borrows from discussions of soul-blindness in Cavell (1979). Bax (2009) suggests that “severe” autists and sociopaths are examples of the soul-blind. Cavell (1979) does not cite autism or sociopathy as illustrations of soul-blindness, however.

15. Stawarska (2010, p. 274).

16. Baz (2000).

17. Mulhall (1990).

18. Bax (2009, p. 73).

19. For example, see Mulhall (1990), Bax (2009), and Proudfoot (2013).

20. Importantly, to embrace the neurodiversity perspective is not to embrace the view that all facets of being autistic are positive. Proponents of neurodiversity grant that some facets of autism are experienced as impairing by some autists in some physical and social environments and that either remediation of these aspects, social change, or both are desirable responses in such cases.

21. See Baron-Cohen, Ashwin, Ashwin, Tavassoli, and Chakrabarti (2009) for discussion of potential links between hyper-systemizing, hyper-attention to detail, and sensory hyper-sensitivities in autism.

22. In her best-selling memoir, Nobody Nowhere (Williams, 1992), Williams further describes how she was overwhelmed by perceiving faces.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Janette Dinishak

Janette Dinishak is Assistant Professor at University of California Santa Cruz – Philosophy