Rainbows End (a landscape model of autism)
I am not a scientist; indeed like Moliere’s Monsieur Jourdain I only recently discovered that I have been a Whorfian [1] relativist all my life. I am in a sense a consumer of numerous scientific and psychological theories of autism by virtue of being the subject matter of them and I guess that allows me the certain right to a “piece of the action.” Without my kind all the conferences all the research money the books, the papers, the kudos and the frustration, the entire academic/media circus of it all would not exist, would not have its causality.
Since we are all in the world of words here, a certain semantic reality has to be recognized. That is the relativity of every concept that is conveyed by them. No sentient human has any more than a theory of mind, a hypothesis regarding whether what we think is at all cognate with another’s cognition.
It is to me a fact that we build the meaning around the perceived words of others according to our own established schemata of the world. No philologising, neologising social scientist or psychologist will ever pin down meaning no matter how hard he or she attempts to define his or her terms of reference because in order to explain language we have to use it. It is rather like Gödel’s [2] theorem of the improvability of mathematics, or the dictionary paperchase where we have to look up the meaning of every word used to define the word we have just looked up ad infinitum.
As Lakoff [3] puts it each of us is an embodied mind and that which we think is wholly constrained within that framework. I am lucky as a neuro-divergent to have a radically different perspective that allows me in the manner of De Bono [4] a sideways look at the universe.
One error I see all the time is the attempt to argue reality from analogy. This is a literalist fallacy which springs to mind every time I see or hear of the Autistic “Spectrum”. As a literalist myself I think I am in a good position to appreciate the deficits of that mode of that kind of thinking.
If we understand that in one sense the “Spectrum” implies that Autism is multi-coloured and variegated and not at all single faceted that is well. Nonetheless it can also serve to bracket our thinking into linear progressions, of points on the spectrum corresponding and analogous to frequencies of light. This leads one literally to suppose the existence of an infra red and ultra violet end of the spectrum, suggesting that there are boundaries and directions, that there are points where one comes onto and falls of the spectrum. All the confusing of High versus Low functioning where the ranges of function are never defined only supposed, apparently self-evident but never explained
The more I read and have read about the spectrum (one of the advantages of my particular autistic mindset being the ability to absorb vast amounts of information at little mental cost so long as it interests me) the more I consider that it is a complicated phenomenon which mutates according to the direction one looks at it.
Alas I am still forced to use analogy, since in essence all language is metaphor [5] and analogy. It is all an extension of the simple concrete terms used to convey common meaning and describe the world so far as it is relevant to survival.
Let us take a dice as an example. You may look at one face of a die and it is a six but turn it over and it is a one. A cube is only a six faceted object yet it conveys to us a huge paradox, how can a thing be all these numbers at once, yet none of them. It is like the concept of the Trinity anecdotally explained by St. Patrick by reference to the Shamrock.
Autism to me is like the die (and the aleatoric implications are not lost either). Baron-Cohen [6] has his Theory of Mind hypothesis, Happé [7] has her central coherence theory, we see Lorna Wing’s[8] triad of impairments and the upharsinogenic [9] categorisation of DSM4 and ICD 10.
Can all of them be true, can any?
I derived the concept of the landscape from considering a WAIS intelligence profile, and the meaninglessness of looking at the mean score as a means to understanding anything. To me that is like trying to navigate an aircraft over unknown terrain by setting ones altimeter to the mean elevation and navigating along that. One will miss seeing anything in the valleys but worse than that one will sooner or later hit a mountain. This is an over simplification for mathematician I am not, spatial thinker I am and can comprehend the reality of a space beyond three or four obvious dimensions.
If we were to plot every observable trait of autism each along its own two dimensional axis and assemble them at conceptual right angles to each other as one does in a 3D graph we will see various shapes emerging which alas it would take a topologist to describe.
I can only attempt to simplify this for understanding, by reference to one example. Take Asperger’s syndrome. If you look at it solely in terms of social dyslexia and you are looking at one continuum only, turn the multi-hedron over and you might look instead at motor deficiencies, turn it again, see perseverations and all absorbing interests.
The single faceted approach of diagnosticians attempting to make sense of what they perceive to be an individual deficiencies look only at the strongest manifestations of a thing and furthermore, human relativists that they are, colour there perceptions according to preconceived schemata.
Thus one may be diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder, one with semantic pragmatic disorder, some with central auditory processing disorder, another with dyspraxia and another perhaps with dyslexia according to whatever present strongest, whereas to me they are all mathematical shapes within the multi-axial model, islands in the neurodiverse landscape as it were.
It is like any map where the different colours represent man made political boundaries, that is to say the diagnoses found in the manuals, but the land is bordered naturally by rivers and valleys where one people inhabits more than one country.
Hitherto the scientist has proceeded with Occam’s Razor in hand, trying not to multiply entities in search of a simplified theory. I say put away the razor and get out the shopping basket, throw everything in and then only discard it when you are sure it is not relevant.
Rainbows End first appeared under the title
Rainbows End: Towards a multi-axial neurodiverse landscape. An alternative perspective on mapping the autistic/spLD phenomenon.
Revised from an impromptu version prepared informally for the 2002 World of Difference Conference,
it appears here by permission of the author, Laurence Arnold.
Footnotes and bibliography available at the author’s website.
Guest on 03/22/10 in Autism, featured | No Comments | Read More
