A Theory of Mind? Or A Theory of War....

Post Reply New Topic

If you are a totally committed believer of Simon Baron-Cohen's theory of mind, think twice before reading the link. It is an eloquent, long and thoughtful rebuttal of that mindset. It's quite a long and intense read, though a worthwhile one I think for others who, like me, are utterly wearied by the rigid theory of mind litany, which was built on the shonky foundation of Baron-Cohen's assertion that "to have a theory of mind is what it is to be fully human, and those autistic folks don't have any theory of mind", (so join the dots folks, they aren't fully human are they?)

I know people will have some very different reactions to this. Nevertheless, the writer brings a fresh perspective and takes a more panoramic view than one usually finds in the more conventional and superficial commentary on TOM.


http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3876/3405

yeah, right
I feel at war with the TOM very much also
as if not fitting the TOMbox of nt is narrow
(I'll read that link later)

I looked at the link briefly but it was just rambling, I couldn't really get the gist.

However I will say that the only time I see people refute SBC's work they are usually fighting a misrepresentation of his work, not what he actually says.

One thing I really despise- that I'm realizing- with the whole diagnosis process that I'm currently going through- is that a LOT of autism questionnaires and such make this assumption that the issues that you had as a kid or would if you were "really" autistic are immutable also there seems to be this undercurrent of autistics being irrevocably stupid.
You can never learn the social skills- you are mind-blind.
You can't possibly cope or learn from your mistakes even when explicitly taught through repetition- because autistics can't learn so if you can you're not autistic.

I get this same feeling from ADHD questionnaires and Depression question tests too (which I had to take everytime at college when I went to the health center whatever), and for a group that talks about how "gray" everything is (NTs = can do shades of grey & autistics = black & white thinking) the questions on these things are always SO BAD.
For example,
"Do you have difficulty taking the perspective of others" Y or N. <- there's a LOT of ways to interpret that question!
Taking perspective of someone when sad because a family member died- no not hard
Perspective of others in a business conference about the social machinations of Bob running for board chair- f**k yes that's hard
Perspective of another autistic person dealing with sensory overload in a crowded supermarket - that's easy
Perspective of my mom getting mad yet again at something stupid my dad said <- gave up on comprehending that long ago.
SO from that, how do u give a "B&W answer" of either Yes- I can't take perspective or N- it's not difficult for me and I can take perspective.
But the answer format leaves no room for gray or alternative answers. However, this is the way I find a LOT of people looking at autism, autistic characteristics, and what it means to be autistic and how that is a limitation on what you can do- NO IT ISN'T, but that seems to be how people see it.
So, when people say autistics are "mind-blind" (even though regular NTs kids ARE TOO UP UNTIL A CERTAIN POINT) they are inherently blind to certain things, and can never not be.

Or as this article points out: "Indeed, this obsession with our incapability transcends scholarly discipline: it is routinely portrayed as an inseparable part of autism as a condition."

which is a sad BS pseudo-reality of how people view autistics. Sometimes I think it is simply NTs that have this ultimate incapability to understand anything that is not NT. Not the other way around. Because autistics can be taught to learn how to understand and empathize with NTs, but I have yet to see an NT(in clinical literature) that truly understands autistics instead of just pathologizing,stigmatizing, and looking for ways to change autistics.

Good link btw.

Hmmm........
"individuals with autism appear to lack the ability to attribute mental states." (Frith, 1999)

"Mum's always a bit cross" (ToughDiamond, ca.1957)

Thank you for such interesting responses so far. I want to add to this conversation a pet peeve of mine regarding Baron-Cohen, something I have observed for a long (and disturbing) time. Whenever his theories are challenged, he characteristically falls back on the "Hey but I am a scientist, those are my findings, I'm just being objective" - implying that anyone who disagrees with him is merely subjective and should therefore be discounted.

This is a very distorted if not outright dishonest position for him to take. Point one: Baron-Cohen is a reductionist scientist. This is a very important distinction that he studiously avoids (of course) and he assumes (usually correctly unfortunately) that the critics he so nonchalantly discounts have no background or training in evaluating reductionist psychology with the kind of critical skills conferred by study in a field like the philosophy of science.

Baron-Cohen seems to expect his theories to be widely taken and accepted at face value, and he is often correct in that. There isn't just "one kind" of science. There isn't just one set of "truths". There are paradigms within which science is conducted and these shift and change over time, and within those paradigms there are perspectives and methodologies which change over time. Reductionist positivism is the kind of science Baron-Cohen practices. A nutshell metaphor which captures its pitfalls is Plato's allegory of the cave dwellers who perceived their own shadows on the cave wall as an independent aspect of reality.

However there are two basic ways of looking at a theory, and what you see can often depend a lot on where you are standing. Baron-Cohen looks at his theories from the inside, his starting point, and his thinking seems to radiate out from there and only from that perspective. Having published his findings, he seems to be incapable of evaluating them from the outside to the inside. So I am relieved and brightened when I find thoughtful critiques from one of the outside in commentators - there are many different standpoints available from that perspective. The link represents one of them, and I particularly warm to it as personally I regard dehumanisation as the most important issue affecting the lives of ASD people.

Unlike most commentators of TOM, the link article doesn't ignore the circular flaws of reductionist theory and the distorted findings that flow from its tautologies, and speculates on how that might translate into the dehumanisation process of a target group.

Very interesting thread of discussion.

I think there is a huge difference between what neurotypical people refer to as intuition, and systems thinking, which is second nature for many autistics. It is so ironic that autistics are often described as "not being able to see the bigger picture". What this stereotype relates to is the absence of social intuition, i.e. in neurotypical terms "the bigger picture" is always "the social picture", or more precisely "the immediate social context within a situation".

For neurotypical individuals, including psychologists and many other experts who study human behaviour, it is virtually impossible to understand the autistic ability to think recursively and in systems of systems, in the same way that it is impossible for autistics to understand social intuition from a first hand perspective.

The following article describes neurotypical thinking about the stages of mental development http://developmentalobserver.blog.com/2 ... heory-cdt/. The pattern and the statistics mentioned in the article seem compatible with my observations (anecdotal evidence), but I can definitely say that it does not apply in my case. I've never had a mode of thinking that corresponds to the "3rd Order: Socialised Mind". I think this is a direct result of a lack of social intuition and a lack of social motivation, in the sense of not having any need or desire to establish or negotiate social status. The whole notion of social status is foreign to me. Star Ford's book http://www.afieldguidetoearthlings.com/ is a brilliant treatise on social status from an external autistic perspective.

In my case, and I suspect in many cases of people who identify as autistic, the stages of mental development as outlined in the article linked above start to make sense only if 3rd order thinking is removed from the picture. As a result, 4th order thinking then becomes a stage where interpersonal, relationships, and mutuality exist alongside one's needs, interests, and desires in the "What can be seen as object" column.

Once the autistic mind progresses beyond 2nd order thinking, it intuitively grasps that all humans have needs, interests, and desires, and that the self is just one of many, and that life seems to be governed by human relationships that seem to function in highly bizarre ways to anyone who is largely blind to the notions of social status and hierarchy. The 3rd order thinking that dominates neurotypical behaviour can be very taxing for autistics, because it is in constant conflict with one's own set of values, and because it stands in the way of solving the really big environmental and social problems that humans are facing.

Once an autistic "anthropologist by birth" has got a good handle on how human cultures develop and propagate, collective human behaviour becomes quite predictable in many (and often depressive) ways. This allows autistics to see business opportunities and new ways of collaboration that seem to defy common [neurotypical] sense.

If autistics, due to a lack of social intuition, are forced to get their head around human relationships from a conscious perspective from a very young age onwards, it is only logical that they often become proficient in 4th or 5th order thinking much earlier than their neurotypical peers. It seems to take neurotypical individuals at least 40 years or longer (mid-life crisis or similar) to arrive at a perspective that allows a meaningful dialogue with autistics. In particular, autistics tend to develop a significant awareness of human diversity at a young age, and by default assume that others are different from them rather than similar to them.

The Web site referenced above is linked to a book that you may enjoy reading http://developmentalobserver.blog.com/2 ... -overview/, in particular to understand the neurotypical challenges related to learning and to adopting new mental models. In the same way that autistics resist externally induced changes to their highly personal routines and rituals, neurotypical individuals resist (and are unsettled by) changes to cultural norms in their social context.

Baron-Cohen is clearly a victim of being confined to the perspective and the limitations of the one paradigm that he has created. I wonder whether Baron-Cohen has ever ventured into the philosophy of science (Thomas Kuhn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn and more recent material on this topic).

Here are two books from evolutionary biologists that I find very useful from my perspective, not limited to understanding humans:
1. On the role of altruism in cultural evolution and the common confusion between proximate and ultimate causation, and also on the perceived conflict between two evolutionary paradigms (inclusive fitness theory and multi-level selection theory) and the limitations of the assumptions invariably need to be made when formalising the theories (the formalisation of "relatedness" in the one case and the formalisation of "group" in the other case) http://www.amazon.com/Does-Altruism-Exi ... B00RVSUNCO
2. On the feedback loops between organisms and environment, and how niche construction and feedbacks invalidate simplistic views of evolution. An amazing amount of examples and detailed references – am still reading. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B014I4HP1. Nature always has more to offer than fits into the neat/simplistic models created by human minds. A very good way to introduce students to the role of feedback in systems is this short explanatory video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOmRob-7xM4.

Thank you - Kuhn's book is a great place to start for anyone interested in exploring how mindsets influence prevailing scientific claims.

Kuhn uses the term "normal science" in this particular way:

Normal science
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Normal science, identified and elaborated on by Thomas Samuel Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is the regular work of scientists theorizing, observing, and experimenting within a settled paradigm or explanatory framework.Regarding science as puzzle-solving, Kuhn explained normal science as slowly accumulating detail in accord with established broad theory, without questioning or challenging the underlying assumptions of that theory.


Since Kuhn's time, where have the philosophers of science disappeared to? Have they all converted to post-modernism and now just talk to each other? (I could understand why they might)

I don't know if I've linked to this on this forum before, but here's Simon Baron-Cohen's reply to an autistic critic, which helped reinforce my view that he is one of the most patronising writers going around.

I hate the word empathy. To me, it feels as though a group of extremely unpleasant people invented the word so that they could use it to dehumanise autistics. I catch my breath every time someone decides that it is a single quality that makes a person human, because inevitably there'll be someone lacking that quality. I also hate how the word can mean almost whatever the speak wants, whether its affective empathy or some other variety - it's a bit like arguing God definitions with Christians. I try to use the word 'empathy' as little as possible.