Paranoia and mental blindness

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If I cannot decipher the other, I cannot have friends. I equate here paranoia with persecutory ideas. If I cannot “read” the other, how can I know what he/she means when he/she talks to me? Words, sentences, judgments expressed to me are acts, have a pragmatic value, are charged, possess intentionality. “Good evening” does not mean that Other augurs you to spend merrily my time for the rest of the day. This should be obvious. If Other wanted me to end up in hospital for a fall (this may well be sometimes), he wouldn’t tell me that straight away. The real meaning of “good evening” may be that, for now, he considers me an acceptable member of the humanity known to him/her. To really know something more relevant I should analyze the tone he uses, his body language, smile, kind of smile (is it a sincere smile or just cold conventional?). Most people don’t need to do these analysis for two reasons 1) they have an instinctive capability (which I don’t have) to read the other speech-acts. 2) they don’t have the need (that I have) to be assured of Other’s sympathy. So life is an ordeal fro me (us?).

Mind of the eye topic

For Autistic persons,The Other is certainly hard to read, if not impossible. I suppose this could lead to paranoia, if you did not trust what the other is thinking. Also, the Other could be hiding, even from other NTs. Some Others are so good at deception because they have honed their skills. I call these persons Psychopaths, fooling even the most intuitive of NTs. Very dangerous for us who have a hard enough time with most typical of Others.

For the reason above I refer to a very handy book by Dr. Robert D. Hare, called Without Conscience: The disturbing world of the Psychopaths among us. In this book he analyzes the Psychopathic personality using case histories and examples of creeps like Robert Bundy, Son of Sam, Jeffrey Dahmer and Clifford Olsen. Other examples of non murderers are "con-men" who take the money and run, taking advantage of others and causing them grief. These Others simply do not care because of a void where their social conscience would be. They are either born this way or have an opportunistic bent to their personalities, which enables them to act without concern for their fellow humans. No remorse for what they have done, and they will act like victims to deflect their own wrongdoings.

I have a sister-in-law like this. She bilked thousands of dollars from people, was caught after many years and jailed. She tried to blame the others for her fraud. This is what psychopaths do. ( I was not one of her victims. I could "see" through her, after reading this book!)

Autistics beware.
We must watch out for them. Hence the paranoia.

Good topic, Paolo. Very topical.

The same words or phrases can mean (represent, refer to) very different things/concepts/notions, depending on the individuals (speaker & listener, or writer & reader). As if that weren't complicated enough, there's also question of how literal or figurative the intended usage of word is on any particular occasion.

People often assume they know what someone else means when both are using same language, but each one is (unbeknownst to one another) operating from nonidentical framework/outlook. Is a wonder that any two people can even communicate with sufficient definitional overlap to converse at all (at least about abstractions). However, even physical sensations (one would think that wold be more universal between persons) are relative, not absolute, and thresholds range widely from one person to the next.

Side note (but a long one):
On subject of thread title (paranoia), this article was absolutely fascinating-there's no mention of AS but I really identified with the experiences/interpretations discussed within. In 2 pieces, as PDF download (thanks to odeon for finding the link !) from Phillip Zimbardo's website:
http://www.zimbardo.com/downloads/disthry1.pdf
http://www.zimbardo.com/downloads/disthry2.pdf
I made a thread on Gestalt forum about above linked paper resonating so strongly with me. Some of my comments:

Gap awareness topic

Belfast, yours is another way of analyzing this topic, and I think this is what the OP probably intended.