Toward Conceptual Responsibility in Autism Discourse

Authors

Abstract

Autism-related concepts shape psychiatric classification, research agendas, clinical communication, policy decisions, and forms of autistic self-understanding. Yet these concepts are often adopted, contested, or revised without sustained reflection on the roles they are meant to serve across different settings. This article examines two widely discussed terms, “neurodivergent” and “profound autism,” and argues that disputes surrounding them often reflect mismatches in conceptual function rather than disagreement about descriptive accuracy alone. Building on conceptual work in philosophy of psychiatry, conceptual ethics, and interdisciplinary autism research, the article develops a four-dimensional framework for evaluating autism-related concepts in terms of internal structure, degree of intentional design, ethical orientation, and empirical grounding. Historical and comparative analysis shows that “neurodivergent” emerged from autistic-led and cross-disability activism as a minimally structured identity concept, whereas “profound autism” was introduced in clinical and administrative contexts as a more structured category tied to research visibility, service coordination, and clinical proxies. The contrast clarifies why tensions arise when concepts designed for different tasks are assessed by the same standards. Rather than proposing conceptual uniformity, the article advances conceptual responsibility as a requirement to make explicit what concepts are being asked to do, which evidential infrastructures sustain them, whose perspectives shape them, and what trade-offs their use entails.

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