Autistic Vulnerability to Intellectual Arrogance

Authors

Abstract

Autistic speakers commonly report feelings of being misunderstood. Such misunderstandings manifest when the communicative intentions of an autist—i.e., an autistic person—are misinterpreted by their interlocutor(s). While in some cases this can lead to seemingly benign kinds of miscommunication, such as when someone takes what was intended as a genuine assertion or question as a joke, the same basic phenomenon can also lead to illegitimate criticism of the autist—e.g., for being “rude” or “weird”. This chapter argues that such misunderstandings, given their frequency, cause serious harm to members of the autistic community and proposes that the frequency of autists being so misunderstood can be explained by a sort of intellectual arrogance often exhibited by allistic (non-autistic) interlocutors. Allistic speakers tend to smuggle certain assumptions into the conversational backdrop because they take these assumptions to be matters of common sense. Yet no principled, much less predictive, account has been provided to explain where such assumptions come from. The dogmatic way that allistic speakers tend to rely on their common sense assumptions in the interpretation of conversational exchanges opens them up to misunderstanding the intentions of others in potentially harmful ways.

No cited bibliography is currently integrated for this reference. This does not necessarily mean that no bibliography exists.