A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.
Marcel Proust
Abstract
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a psychopathological condition characterized by persistent deficits in social interaction and communication, and restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior and interests. To build an ecological-enactive account of autism, I propose we should endorse the affordance-based approach of the skilled intentionality framework (SIF). In SIF, embodied cognition is understood as skilled engagement with affordances in the sociomaterial environment of the ecological niche by which an individual tends toward the optimal grip. The human econiche offers a whole landscape of affordances, and situated individuals respond to a field of relevant affordances. An important part of SIF is an ecological-enactive interpretation of the free energy principle and predictive processing. Predictive processing accounts indicate that in ASD too much precision is assigned to prediction errors. Autistic persons depend heavily on current sensory information and less on prior beliefs and cannot attune to stable regularities. To reduce uncertainty, they over-rely on routines, strict habits, and a familiar environment—a predictable ecological niche they construct. I argue that skilled intentionality gives us the framework from which to analyze the autistic field of affordances. Autistic patterns of affordance-related bodily states of action readiness are only sensitive to very specific solicitations in the environment and achieve optimal grip in well-known situations. Autism is to be understood as a disorder of bodily normativity. Taking this approach helps us figure out what neurotypical people can do to attune their environment in order to scaffold the needs of autistic individuals by redesigning the landscape of affordances.
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Notes
The fifth iteration (APA, 2013) differs from the fourth (APA, 2000) in that it combines previously separate categories of autistic disorder, Asperger syndrome, pervasive developmental disorder-not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS) and childhood disintegrative disorder—into a single consolidated umbrella diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder.
These were described by both Kanner and Asperger, though interpreted differently; Sukhareva describes it as “‘a tendency towards automatism’ and that this manifested “as sticking to tasks which had been started and as psychic inflexibility with difficulty in adaptation to novelty” (Sukhareva, 1925; cited in Sher & Gibson, 2021).
Temple Grandin is a highly intelligent, high-functioning autistic woman who has a PhD in animal science and has published more than 200 scientific articles and autobiographical accounts on her experiences with autism.
Peter Hobson argued that thinking and feeling are deeply related, and that self-conscious affectivity helps constitute the concept of self (Hobson, 1990). In autism, the abilities for social-emotional relatedness are severely limited (e.g., being unable to identify with the attitudes of others), and this seems to be the source of later deficits in creative symbolic thinking and self-reflective awareness (Hobson, 2018).
Living beings are actively searching, and engaging the environment for affordances, trying to make sense of it through moving, they enact their world through sense-making (Varela et al., 1991; Di Paolo, 2009). Participatory sense-making comes from social interactions and relations with other human beings in the shared human reality which is “interenacted” (Fuchs, 2018, pp. 26–27; De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007).
In this hypothesis, authors integrate predictive processing with intersubjective approaches and understand ASD as “a cumulative interpersonal mismatch of prediction and interaction styles… with the world and others across multiple timescales” (Bolis et al., 2021, p. 223).
I am thankful to the anonymous reviewer for pointing out that this needs to be made explicit.
There are not many ecological approaches to psychopathology. Another interesting approach to the ecological side of psychopathological disorders has been advocated by Thomas Fuchs (2007, 2019). He draws from both the phenomenology of the lived body (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2002) and ecological psychology (Gibson, 1979), bringing concepts like the phenomenal field and lived space (permeated by field forces, towards affordances/valences of the environment). The lived space of a person is its ecological niche (feedback cycles of “responded activity”). The ecological niche can be considered a segment of the environment that is complementary to the dispositions of the individual—objects living and nonliving, with which an individual interacts (Fuchs, 2007, p. 42; 2019, p. 3). The econiche offers different affordances (possibilities for action). Fuchs applied these concepts to psychopathology and psychotherapy in order to institute an ecological approach to psychic disorders and ecological psychotherapy.
SIF research program plan is to understand social interaction in terms of skilled intentionality.
So, their human econiche is broader than the niche Fuchs has in mind (as cited in footnote 8).
As pointed out by Georges Canguilhem, although some conditions are pathological by common standards, they are experienced and understood as normal by the person who has the condition. Experiential life is norm-instituting or normalizing, and so the pathological is not just something lacking norm, but that which institutes its own normality (Canguilhem, 1991).
One of the anonymous reviewers has remarked that Helmholtz, in all likelihood, would have been congenial with an enactivist interpretation of unconscious inference, especially when one takes into account his careful considerations of active vision. I thank the reviewer for this comment.
I thank the anonymous reviewer for pointing out that this needs to be qualified.
Here are two quotes that clarify suboptimality. Schwartenbeck et al. say: “In short, characterising the generative model underlying suboptimal behavior provides a principled approach to understanding the origins of maladaptive behavior as well as the diverse computational phenotypes that present similar ‘symptoms’” (2015, p. 116). Corlett and Fletcher point out that: “Psychiatric illness and distress might be considered in terms of a failure to achieve this optimum interaction, and the challenge faced by computational psychiatry is to identify and quantify this suboptimal state” (2014, p. 401).
Recall what being healthy means in terms of bodily normativity, as explained at the end of Sect. 3.
“insistence on sameness” (Kanner, 1943).
The ecological approach of Constant, Bervoets, et al. (2018) is complementary to the dialectical misattunement hypothesis (Bolis et al., 2017), embracing the intersubjectivist turn in cognitive science and autism research, and viewing ASD as a relational disorder, while the original PP theories (HIPPEA) viewed ASD individualistically.
Van Es and Bervoets (2022), in their recent enactivist take on autism, construe ASD as a sensorimotor atypicality (“different autistic embodiment”).
Kiverstein has construed empathy as responsiveness to social affordances. The empathic abilities of ASD persons are diminished, and their empathy is less direct (Kiverstein, 2015, p. 8). Applying his model of empathy to ASD, Kiverstein argues that autistic persons do not orient attention to the aspects of the environment that others see as important (because of “abnormal patterns of gaze fixation”) and thus have difficulty sharing perspectives with others (they are without those states of bodily action readiness that would direct them to shared aspects of the environment).
See footnote 7.
See Bolis et al. (2021) for a study on interpersonal synchrony that corroborates this claim.
Corlett and Fletcher, in their discussion on computational psychiatry, recognize that even the smallest changes in information processing can have catastrophic consequences but add that “many junctures exist at which intervention might be possible” (2014, p. 401).
I thank the anonymous reviewer for pushing me to flesh out the dynamics of autistic bodily normativity in more detail and to distinguish different forms of bodily normativity.
In the case that autism can be considered a form of life for itself, then we would be in a position to claim that there is a different autistic landscape of affordances (cf. Catala et al., 2021). It would be a very desolate landscape of affordances. See Chapman (2019), who argues for a Wittgensteinian account of autism as a different form of life. They propose an account of epistemic injustice, epistemic agency, and epistemic disablement in autism based on this ecological-enactive model of disability and enactivist cognitive science. They talk of an autistic landscape of affordances.
Let me explain the temporal depth claim a bit further. Temporally thick self-models concern the depth of prior beliefs about the enactable future, namely, prior beliefs about the consequences of committing to this or that plan of action (where prior beliefs are read in a strictly Bayesian sense, e.g., subpersonal). These kinds of prior beliefs are agential and pertain to the self. However, they are still just prior beliefs and will be subverted if held with unduly low precision or (subpersonal) conviction. This is precisely the pathology induced by overly precise sensory precision (i.e., imbuing the likelihood part of the generative model with too much precision). The pathology of precision that accounts for ASD necessarily shrinks the depth or time horizon of any planned interaction with the world (or body), whether these plans are in the interoceptive or prosocial domains. I thank the reviewer for providing valuable comments on the temporal depth of self-models.
This is taken from Boldsen’s fieldwork in a social group for adolescents and young adults with autism. This part describes how one of the women, Eva, reacts to the environment of the museum.
Boldsen utilizes Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological notion of milieu (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2002, 2010) to clarify how social interaction is not just embodied but also “material and situational”. The milieu is described as a field of forces (Merleau-Ponty, 2010, p. 346), and “milieu is not merely a material space that contains bodies but a field of potentiality within which body and world emerge” (Boldsen, 2021, p. 35). There is a clear similarity and close connectedness of this notion with phenomenological notions mentioned earlier—Fuchs’s lived space (which has field forces towards affordances) and SIF’s field of affordances.
The skills and habits the agent has developed are what explains why certain affordances in the environment stand out and are inviting for action, and other affordances are not (Bruineberg et al., 2021, pp. 12824–12825).
Activities like swimming and collage, for an autistic woman Penelope Dunbar. On how structured routine with clear narrative purpose can help autistic individulas, see Delafield-Butt et al. (2022).
Following in the ecological and enactive theories of Fuchs (2007, 2019), and the SIF (Rietveld et al., 2018), in other work (Nešić, Subotić & Nurkić, manuscript), we discuss social environments that increase predictability through ritual behavior and routines (e.g., religious communities) and which could prove to be beneficial for people with ASD. We argue that a monastic environment can be regarded as providing shelter for autistic individuals, as witnessed in the historical case study of Hildegard of Bingen (c. 1098–1179).
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Acknowledgements
Drafts of the paper were presented at the Situated Cognition Spring School (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), the British Society for Phenomenology Conference, and the Renewing Phenomenological Psychopathology Project Launch Event. I’d like to thank the audience on these occasions. I am indebted to Sabrina Coninx, Thomas Fuchs, Sofie Boldsen and Julian Kiverstein for feedback on earlier versions of the paper. I am grateful to Petar Nurkić for his support and to Vanja Subotić for her critical readings of the manuscript. I would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their detailed and helpful comments.
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Nešić, J. Ecological-enactive account of autism spectrum disorder. Synthese 201, 67 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04073-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04073-x