Tag: Autism

Empathy with Peers?

I just saw a reference to one of Hans Asperger’s original characterizations of empathy issues in his autistic subjects. Rather than empathy for others, the phrase used is “empathy with peers” (emphasis added). Arguably, this qualification turns the “empathy” that ought to be kind and beautiful into an implicit criterion of social conformity.

I think empathy applies to people, not to abstract so-called peer groups like school classes or co-workers. Groups as such don’t have feelings. The notion of a “typical” peer is prejudicial, and “peers” is a loaded term at best. It means others like oneself. But in the cases Asperger was describing, it seems likely that all involved felt that the ones singled out and the others were somehow fundamentally not alike.

If we cannot get along with others who are different from us, that is an issue for anyone. But it is also a two-way street, and the majority are not always right or better by the mere fact of numbers.

“Mentalizing” vs Emotional Empathy

My old thumbnail sketch Mind Without Mentalism now feels very underdeveloped when read on its own, but a fair amount of supporting detail has appeared by now. Pursuing a tangent of a tangent, today I ran across a 2001 article by a distinguished German psychologist, claiming to have experimental evidence of a dedicated physical neurocognitive mechanism for “mentalizing” of more or less the sort that I consider to be a philosophical disaster.

Uta Frith writes, “normal individuals have the capacity to ‘mind read,’ that is, to attribute mental states to self and other. This is referred to as the ‘theory of mind’ or ‘mentalizing.’ The theory assumes that this capacity, far from being the product of complex logical inference, rests on a dedicated neurocognitive mechanism…. Experimental evidence shows that the inability to attribute mental states, such as desires and beliefs, to self and others (mentalizing) explains the social and communication impairments of individuals with autism. Brain imaging studies in normal volunteers highlight a circumscribed network that is active during mentalizing.”

It’s not my purpose to question the experimental results presented. Neuroscience has made tremendous advances, and undoubtedly will make many more. But some of its practitioners make very strong statements that generalize and make interpretations about the human “mind” based on results that are really far narrower.

Very different things are implicitly blurred together in this notion of “theory of mind” as a “capacity” that is “missing” in autism, which was originally developed by British psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen.

It is one thing to practically recognize the beliefs and desires of other people that are different from one’s own. That is at once an ethical stance and an interpretive judgment.

It is something quite different to conceptualize beliefs and desires of oneself or others as mental states. Plato and Aristotle developed very rich accounts of human belief and desire without ever speaking of mental states or of a mind as such. Rather than attributing beliefs and desires to minds, they attributed them to people.

The author claims that “mind reading” is not a kind of inference, but rather is physically grounded. This has all the hallmarks of attempts at highly reductive empirical-physicalistic “explanation”. For example, assuming that the data in question did show a statistical difference in neurological activity between “autistic” and “non-autistic” people, that in no way proves that inference does not play a major role in the considerations of belief and desire relevant to ethical doing.

The beliefs and desires of concern to ethics are evidenced in speech and doing. Sensitivity to them requires only interpretative judgment, not positing of mental states.

The binary division between “autistic” and “non-autistic” is also extremely suspect. Official psychiatric diagnostic standards currently define “autism” as a broad spectrum rather than a univocal concept. Meanwhile, “non-autistic” would include both so-called neuro-typical people, and all the people who are different in other ways. That makes it what Hegel would call merely an indeterminate negation.

Paralleling the Hegelian ethical theme of mutual recognition, an alternative view of autism calling for “double empathy” has been developed by English sociologist Damian Milton. This is supported by recent studies that distinguished between “cognitive” and “emotional” empathy, while finding autistic people to have higher than normal emotional empathy.

The psychologists who have talked about this ambiguous “theory of mind” in relation to autism have focused on autistic people’s lesser capacity for what is called cognitive empathy, colloquially called “mind reading” above. But other researchers have suggested that emotional empathy is more closely related to ethical concern.

Being myself a poor “mind reader” whom others deem to have high emotional empathy, I abhor the suggestion that empathy and ethics depend on mind reading. (See also Empathy and Psychology; Empathy and Mutual Recognition.)