The experience of autism: An enactive approach.

With Steve Torrance

At “Constructing Consciousness, Mind and Being” British Psychological Society, Oxford, 16-18 Sep.

With

On an enactive account, a cogniser is a mind embodied in an autonomous (self-organising and self-maintaining) biological organism. Such an organism has a nervous system that works as an organizationally closed network, generating endogenous patterns of activation. Cognition is conceived as meaning-generation and arises from the embodied, sensorimotor coupling between organism and environment. The organism’s experiential awareness of its self and its world is a central feature of its lived embodiment in the world.

The environment or context of an organism, especially a human, consists also of his or her social environment. We propose looking at autism through enactivist spectacles as a fruitful endeavour for gaining more insight into both autism and social understanding.

We discuss some recent work which we think constitutes attempts to apply a broadly enactive approach to autism (Hobson 2002; Klin, Jones et al. 2003; Gallagher 2004). Then we ask: In the light of insights gained from general enactive approaches, and the specific work discussed, can an account of autism be developed which improves upon existing views?

As a (partial) answer to that question we elaborate the following themes:

- Within an enactive approach, the experience of autism becomes important and informative. The phrase “the experience of autism” has at least two points of entrance: what it is like to have autism on the one hand, and what it is like to interact with someone who has autism on the other. From this point of view, autism is viewed not as a set of observable symptoms, from which we infer to the hidden structures underlying those symptoms, but rather as a set of experiences, which we strive to explore on the one hand and to participate with on the other, rather than simply observe.

- Autism is as much to do with perceptual matters as with social interaction, and the latter two are intimately intertwined. This point entails a critique of the ‘standard’ enactivist view of perception as centred on skills of operating with sensorimotor contingencies, whereas we propose that one also has to take into account social contingencies.

- The second point also brings to the surface the need for a deepening of the concept of intersubjectivity. Social interaction is more than the sum of the contributions of the interaction partners, because of the specific sensori-social contingencies generated in the interaction and the specific phenomenology of being in interaction.

In sum, our proposal to look at autism from an enactivist point of view deepens the enactive view itself, by exploring its potential for explaining social interaction through an examination of the close interrelation between social and perceptual capacities. It also evaluates the enactive view’s potential for shedding new light on autism and on explanatory theories of the latter, by taking seriously a participative method of investigation centred on experience.

Gallagher, S. (2004). "Understanding interpersonal problems in autism: Interaction Theory as an alternative to Theory of Mind." Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology 11(3): 199-217.

Hobson, R. P. (2002). The Cradle of Thought. London, Macmillan.

Klin, A., W. Jones, et al. (2003). "The enactive mind, or from actions to cognition: lessons from autism." Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society London B 358: 345-360.