2:48am July 12, 2014

Open letter to “theory of mind deficit” proponents

Either autistic people have a theory of mind, or theory of mind isn’t a fundamental part of being human. It can’t be a fundamental part of being human if some humans don’t have it.

I’m as human as you are. That isn’t questionable.

Yours sincerely, an autistic person

P.S. your evidence that we don’t have theory of mind is sketchy as all hell anyway, most of us (including me) know damn well that other people have minds that aren’t like ours.

If you want some evidence about this I’d again suggest going to Morton Gernsbacher’s autism website. I forget which article but basically…

The Sally-Anne test relies on some of the most difficult language constructions in the English language.

Autistic people have language delays.

Many autistic people pass the Sally-Anne test, so they make the test harder and harder by adding convoluted language to it like “What does Sally think that Anne thinks that Mark thinks?” Until finally the autistic person is tripped up by the language and can be said to lack ‘third-order theory of mind’ or some bullshit.

Anyway they did some tests.

They tested autistic people using a language-free test of theory of mind (specifically, a false belief task similar to Sally-Anne). Autistic people slightly outperformed nonautistic people. Slightly outperformed.

They also took children with something called Specific Language Impairment. Children with SLI are by definition not autistic and don’t have social skills problems. They gave them the Sally Anne test. They did just as badly as autistic people matched with them for degree of language impairment.

Therefore, as far as they know, the “autistics lack theory of mind” thing is based entirely in how much language impairment an autistic person has at understanding certain extremely complex language constructions. If you get nonautistic people with similar language impairment, they do just as bad. If you take away the language bias of the test, autistic people do just as well as nonautistic people and sometimes slightly better than nonautistic people.

So the theory of mind thing is bullshit. Basically.

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