In two minds: Theory of Mind,intersubjectivity,and autism

Theory of Mind

In 1985 a group of researchers – Simon Baron-Cohen, Alan Leslie, and Uta Frith – based at the Medical Research Council’s Cognitive Development Unit in London, published a seminal article entitled: “Does the autistic child have a theory of mind?” (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985). This paper drew together a number of ideas about how minds work to try to understand the nature of autism as a cognitive impairment and at its core was the concept of “theory of mind” as a “mechanism which underlies a crucial aspect of social skills, namely being able to conceive of mental states: that is knowing that other people know, want, feel, or believe things” (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985, p. 38). The idea of ToM is that people who have it can be in two minds at once—their own and that of another person—and Baron-Cohen has used the terms “mindreading” to describe this human capacity and “mindblindness” to describe the failure of some people to be able to do it (1995, pp. 1–7). Uta Frith has separately described the same process as “mentalizing”: “It is what we do when we attribute mental states to others to predict their behaviour” (2003, p. 80).

The concept of ToM that Baron-Cohen, Leslie, and Frith were interested in was the ordinary ability to make imaginative but informed judgements about what is in someone else’s mind. It was the apparent failure of children who had been diagnosed as autistic to impute a false belief to a character in a scenario that led to their suggestion that children with autism had a problem with ToM. There were two characters in the scenario; Sally who, having placed a marble in her basket, left the room and so did not see the second, Anne, who takes the marble from Sally’s basket and hides it in a box. When Sally returned the children were asked where she would think the marble was and 16 out of 20 of the children with autism said it was in the box whereas 23 out of 27 children with no impairment and 12 out of 14 children with Down’s syndrome said she would think it was still in the basket. It seems that 80% of the children with autism were unable to impute to Sally the “false belief” that the marble was still in the basket (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985). This small study has had an enormous impact on trying to understand autism and has led to over 20 years of research and discussion that expanded on, refined, and challenged the interpretation of the original researchers that this was evidence of a tendency in children with autism to lack “theory of mind” (there are extensive reviews in Astington, Harris, & Olson, 1988; Carruthers & Smith, 1996; Frith & Happé, 1994; Hamilton, 2009; Rajendran & Mitchell, 2007; Tager-Flusberg, 2007). Fundamental to the idea of ToM and the behavioural experiments that followed was that it was a biological “mechanism” of the organ of the brain that was somehow damaged or deficient from birth in those with autism (Baron-Cohen, 1995, p. 51; Frith, 2003, p. 80).

The key concept of ToM originated in a study of the cognitive capacity of primates by David Premack and Guy Woodruff published under the title “Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?” (1978). ¹ The research was in a tradition of studying primates to find out how similar their intellectual capacities were to those of human beings—for example in understanding language and working out complex tasks. The chimpanzee in their study watched videos of a human trying to get a difficult-to-reach banana. The video was stopped before the human got the banana and the chimp was then presented with still photographs of possible solutions and had to pick the one that they thought the human participant would have used. From their experiments, the researchers claimed that a chimp:

makes sense of what he sees by assuming that the human actor wants the banana and is struggling to reach it. He further assumes that the actor knows how to attain the banana, so that when the animal is shown photographs depicting solutions to the problem, he chooses correctly in three out of four cases. (Premack & Woodruff, 1978, p. 518)

The researchers’ own interpretation of their data inductively attributed mental states (“makes sense of,” “assumes”) to the chimpanzee, including those thoughts that they presume the chimpanzee is imputing to another human, with very little substantive evidence. ² They claimed that the chimp had to know that the human had a mind and that it could interpret how the human would reason—that is, the chimp had a “theory of mind.” They argued that this was not the same as empathy, in which the chimp might imagine him or herself to be in the position of the man and choose what he, the chimp, would do to get the banana. To have ToM means that who the actor is must be taken into account; what does the man know, how does he see the world?

What this research actually tells us about chimpanzees is seriously contested (Heyes, 1998; Smith, 1996) and as Frans de Waal (2006) argues, it is at best a test about apes’ ability to have a theory of human mind. Their failure in such tasks does not mean that they don’t have a theory of ape mind and de Waal offers anecdotes to suggest that they are able to take the perspective of other apes, to see the risks and advantages in the world as other apes see them (2006, pp. 9–73). Premack and Woodruff’s concept of ToM is altogether more far-reaching and human than primate research is able to demonstrate. They define “theory of mind” as meaning that “the individual imputes mental states to himself and to others” and go on to list as the sorts of mental states that might be imputed: “purpose or intention, beliefs, thoughts, knowledge, likes, guesses, pretence, promising and trusting” (1978, p. 515). This very broad concept of ToM attracted considerable interest from philosophers, psychologists, zoologists, and anthropologists, a number of whom contributed commentaries to a special issue of The Behavioural and Brain Sciences in 1978. Among these was a short essay by Daniel Dennett (1978b), the philosopher of consciousness who in his own substantial discussions of theories of the mind has shown little taste for “physicalism” (the view that “minds are just brains”; Dennett, 1978a, pp. xi–ii). Nonetheless, he wanted to see better tests for the presence of theory of mind in chimpanzees and proposed one, based on the participant recognising false belief in someone else, which led eventually to the Sally–Anne test used by Baron-Cohen, Leslie, and Frith in 1985.

The “false belief” test is a limited approach to the concept of ToM and the claim that “autistic children as a group fail to employ theory of mind” (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985, p. 43) seems excessive when only four-fifths of the children with autism in a small study didn’t see things the way other children did. Nonetheless, it provided some support for the idea of ToM—of being able to infer what should or might be in the mind of someone else—and led to further tests such as the “eyes” task, the “windows” test, and the “strange stories” tests (Happé, 1994; Kleinman, Marciano, & Ault, 2001; Rajendran & Mitchell, 2007). Although these lacked the causal reasoning of the Sally–Anne test they are more generally related to focus of attention, understanding, and social interaction and interpretation. As Frith and Happé (1994) argued, ToM was not good for explaining clinical features noticed in autism including restricted repertoire of interests, excellent rote memory, and close attention to detail. The limitations of ToM as an explanation of autism led researchers to look at other cognitive deficits such as in executive function (goal directed behaviour and planning) and information processing (good at processing detail but poor at context and overall pattern) (see Frith & Happé, 1994; Rajendran & Mitchell, 2007).

Although it continues to be researched (e.g., Adler, Nadler, Eviatar, & Shamay-Tsoory, 2010; Boucher, 2012; Crane, Goddard, & Pring, 2013; Moran et al., 2011; Spek, Scholte, & Van Berckelaer-Onnes, 2010; Zalla, Barlassina, Buon, & Leboyer, 2011) the concept of ToM has begun to wane in significance in the literature on autism and has come under strong criticism from psychiatric and philosophical approaches to the mind (Plastow, 2012a, 2012b; Shankar, 2004). Sociological approaches drawing on Mead (1934) and Ryle (1949/1973) have proposed the “social construction of mind” (Coulter, 1979, 1989). They have been strongly critical of the ToM approach to understanding autism (see Leudar & Costall, 2009; Leudar, Costall, & Francis, 2004; Sharrock & Coulter, 2004) and demonstrated its inadequacy in understanding the behaviour of children with autism (Colombino, 2004, 2006; Reddy & Morris, 2009) as well as for interpreting the writings of those with autism (E. Williams, 2009). In the history, diagnosis, and treatment of autism, ToM has played a relatively small role compared with its impact on psychological and cognitive research (see Feinstein, 2010, pp. 211–217). The behavioural origins of ToM were thought to indicate a defect in the biological structure in the brain of people with autism, a “module” that was malformed and functioning defectively (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Leslie, 1987), but the recent shift of attention from behavioural studies of cognition to genetic studies and MRI research has further displaced ToM as an explanation of autism (see for example de Sousa, Holt, Pagnamenta, & Monaco, 2011; Le Couteur, 2011; Silverman, 2012; Spencer, Stanfield, & Johnstone, 2011).

Intersubjectivity

Phenomenology is a very different approach to the study of how the human mind engages with the world around it, including other minds that have equivalent capacities. The phenomenological account of mind does not reduce it to the physical organ of the brain but describes it experientially as the seat of consciousness in which intention is directed towards things that take on meaning or significance for a person, or an “ego-subject” (Husserl, 1913–1950/1982). As well as challenging traditional realist philosophy, phenomenology also challenges psychology because it argues that rather than positing the world as already existing and accessible to scientific methods, every mode of knowledge must operate through consciousness. Consciousness involves intentionality, “consciousness of something,” the attention or “regard” that a wide-awake human subject gives to something whether it is a sense perception, a memory, or an idea (Husserl, 1913–1950/1982, p. 75). Phenomenology reflects on how it is we can grasp what the world is and what it contains, including other people (Husserl, 1913–1950/1982, p. 114).

For Husserl, to have a mind depends on the possibility of engaging with a second mind through intersubjectivity and making a reasonable presumption of what is in that other mind. Having a mind includes being aware of other people who also have intentional minds who are experienced as “other streams of mental processes” (Husserl, 1913–1950/1982, p. 79). Other people’s sensory experiences can never be experienced directly with the force of self-evidence (Husserl, 1952/1989, p. 210) but the proximity, both physically and in terms of experience, of two ego-subjects who recognise each other as having consciousness leads to a flow of understanding each of the other. Husserl sets out the intersubjective nature of the conscious mind like this: “I experience the world … not as … my private synthetic formation but … as an intersubjective world, actually there for everyone” (Husserl, 1929–1950/1999, p. 91). The mind of another person becomes apparent as a sort of analogue that is distinct from but in effect mirrors the consciousness of the ego-subject (Husserl, 1929–1950/1999, p. 94). The awareness of this second mind and its sensory experience confirms the objectivity and harmony of the surrounding world and Nature. Each person experiences the world through their bodily perception and action, a psychophysical “owness” that is also however “an intersubjective sphere of ownness,” made up of a “community of monads” each experiencing it through their own consciousness (Husserl, 1929–1950/1999, p. 107).

In Max Scheler’s (1912/1954) version of phenomenology, intersubjectivity, and the interconnection between people and their sense of each other that he calls “fellow feeling,” is fundamental to a person’s identification as a human being. To achieve a perception of oneself in a mode of reflective awareness requires, he says, the same externalising perception as is required to perceive what is in the mind of someone else. Rather than inferring a similar inner state to someone else he regards being able to perceive other minds as primordial to any perception of inner experience, any awareness of self. As he puts it “everyone can apprehend the experience of his fellowmen just as directly (or indirectly) as he can his own” (Scheler, 1912/1954, p. 256). All that distinguishes the experiences of one mind from that of the other is the physical, sensuous experience that accompanies it. However, Scheler’s assertion that intersubjectivity is prior to subjective awareness is not followed by other phenomenologists. Edith Stein’s (1917/1964) systematic review of empathy in the phenomenological tradition points out that Scheler fails to recognise a pure “I” to which all experience is oriented, whether in a foreign mind or in one’s own. The primordial “I” that experiences inner perception is not quite the same as the reflective “I” that turns towards inner experience from a later moment. Stein develops a Husserlian approach to intersubjectivity in which “… empathy is a kind of act of perceiving sui generis … This is how man grasps the psychic life of his fellow man” (1917/1964, p. 11). The actions of the other person are experienced as proceeding from their will, their feelings, and their thoughts and are grasped empathically. As Zahavi has it, the empathic model is: “a specific mode of consciousness … which is taken to allow us to experience and understand the feelings, desires, and beliefs of others in a more-or-less direct manner” (2001, p. 153).

I will pick out five interconnected processes of intersubjectivity that phenomenologists use to describe how the mind of one person becomes understandable to another. First there is co-presence, the awareness of the other’s bodily engagement with the same natural and physical world at the same time and place, which depends on recognising the other as being embodied or incarnate and having a broadly similar sensory experience of the world. As Zahavi (2001) reminds us, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s approach to intersubjectivity is based on the perceiving subject having been “thrown” into a world of nature, of time, and of culture (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1962, pp. 346–347). That world includes other people, and as he says: “If my consciousness has a body, why should other bodies not ‘have’ consciousnesses?” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1962, p. 351). Intersubjectivity at a bodily level exists prior to language and Merleau-Ponty gives the example of a baby opening its mouth when an adult playfully pretends to bite one of its fingers. Even at 15 months “biting” has an intersubjective significance and the baby “perceives its intentions in its body, and my body with its own, and thereby my intentions in its own body” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1962, p. 352). The process of intersubjectivity begins with a bodily awareness that “discovers in that other body a miraculous prolongation of my own intentions, a familiar way of dealing with the world” (p. 354), but it develops to recognise a common usage of tools and cultural objects, including language. Zahavi (2001, p. 164) cites contemporary empirical studies that support Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and suggest that an innate body schema provides a primordial basis for connectivity between self and other. The concept of “being with” or sharing the world is, for Martin Heidegger, an existential characteristic implicit in the very way we make sense of the world (1962, p. 156). For Husserl embodied intersubjectivity includes “co-perception”—perceiving the same thing at the same time—and a “pairing” association of one’s body with that of the other, each assimilating the sense experience of the other as analogous to their own (Husserl, 1929–1950/1999, p. 118).

Second, given enough common ground of sensory experience, a person can, through an act of imagination, apperceive indirectly that which the other perceives directly. Apperception neither involves conscious thought nor a cognitive inference but is a process in which we “noticingly grasp” or apprehend something on the basis of prior knowledge. The already-given, everyday world provides the basis for understanding what someone else’s senses are responding to, through “… an analogizing transfer,” a sense of this being similar to that (Husserl, 1929–1950/1999, p. 111). The same “harmonious memories” that by internal perception help me make sense of the world in my living present, also help me to grasp the world that is livingly present to someone else.

The third process of intersubjectivity, empathy, is not so directly a bodily process of analogous experience as co-presence and apperception but is a sharing of emotions and feelings that lead to a higher psychic sphere of reciprocal understanding. In making sense of the outward conduct of someone who is angry or cheerful through a pairing association, the empathiser makes new associations of the similarity and differences of the other’s psychic life to his or her own (Husserl, 1929–1950/1999, p. 120). The intersubjective process of empathy involves the transfer to another person of what has been present to someone’s direct experience, which Husserl calls appresentation. In exploring the example of someone touching an object in his presence Husserl says: “All this is given to me myself as belonging together in co-presence and is then transferred over in empathy: the other’s touching hand which I see, appresents to me his solipsistic view of this hand and then also everything that must belong to it in presentified co-presence” (Husserl, 1952/1989, p. 174). I can vicariously share your experience as being “such as I should be if I were there” whether or not we share the same space and time (Husserl, 1929–1950/1999, p. 119). Because my body and its sensuous engagement with the world is more or less the same as yours I can empathise with the pain that you feel when you twist your ankle or when you are embarrassed by a cutting remark. But intersubjectivity is more than sharing experiences between individual people; for Husserl the foundation of intersubjectivity through empathy leads to a shared world of humanity and culture that, along with the common experience of nature and the practical world, is the basis of what he calls the “life-world.”

A fourth process of intersubjectivity comes from Jean-Paul Sartre (1943/2003) and is that of the look, the sense that one is looking at someone else or that someone else is looking at me. What is important here is not simply the visual function of the eyes, or even that they are directed at another person. ³ A look that recognises the other as a person, sees that, unlike an object, they have a spatial orientation to the things around them that is comparable to but different from one’s own spatial orientation (Sartre, 1943/2003, p. 278). But when the other feels the look, each has the experience of one subject looking at another. This is different from a subject looking at an object and Sartre explores the theme of the look by thinking about someone looking without being seen, through a keyhole. In this situation one person is looking at another, aware of and interpreting their actions as those of another subject. But the “looked at” person is oblivious of the look, unable to reciprocate, and not in a position to respond, look away, or ignore it. Even for the “looker” there is the sensation of being alone, of not being in the presence of others, until someone is heard in the corridor behind her or him which changes things: “I see myself because somebody sees me … I am for myself only as a pure reference to the Other” (Sartre, 1943/2003, p. 284). The shame that comes with being discovered is the recognition of the fact that it is “I” who the Other is looking at and judging; the Other brings my subjectivity into my reflexive consciousness.

A fifth process of intersubjectivity is communicative interaction, the expression and interpretation of meaning through language and gesture as explored by Alfred Schutz (1972). Interpretation may begin with observing the movements of another person’s body and working out “in our mind’s eye exactly how we would carry out the action in question. Then we can actually imagine ourselves doing it” (Schutz, 1972, p. 114). Knowing about the other’s past, their plans, and attending to their expressive acts—their facial movements, gestures, or speech—can supplement direct observation of their action. Expressive acts involve signs that represent something and their interpreter uses his or her previous experience of their meanings to understand what is in the mind of someone else. This is a communication between minds that draws on a shared life-world:

A sign is by its very nature something used by a person to express a subjective experience. Since, therefore, the sign always refers back to an act of choice on the part of a rational being—a choice of this particular sign—the sign is also an indication of an event in the mind of the sign-user. (Schutz, 1972, p. 119)

Dan Zahavi (2001) argues for an integration of the different accounts of intersubjectivity that goes beyond empathy and includes the past and future world of other people and other things, in which both subjectivity and intersubjectivity must exist. Here I have listed five processes of intersubjectivity that include empathy, but go beyond to include co-presence, apperception, the look, and communicative interaction. The “life-world” that Husserl describes is an environment available to each individual that is also shared with others; it is the world of practical experience, the flow of ordinary, concrete life in which the trajectory of a personal life is linked to that of its cultural community. The character of this continual present is one of habit, routine, and stability that nonetheless incorporates incremental change so that, while largely the same from one moment to the next, the environment of the life-world is in continual flux. The universal sociality of mankind is made up of a series of relations that Husserl calls the “I-you-synthesis” and the “we-synthesis” of people who share an “intersubjectively identical life-world-for-all” (Husserl, 1954/1970, p. 172). Just how common experiences are between people will vary but when I see the other person’s facial expressions and bodily gestures and hear their speech, they at least communicate their consciousness “which in empathy, is characterized as the actual will of this person and as a will which addresses me in communication … motivates my counter-willing or my submission etc.” (Husserl, 1952/1989, p. 247). Ultimately no one knows precisely or fully what is going on in someone else’s mind but the phenomenological account of mind sees a fundamental commonality in the workings of consciousness and its capacity to apprehend the world and recognise and respond to others who display consciousness. The life-world is shared with “all living beings insofar as they have, even indirectly but still verifiably, something like ‘life’, and even communal life in the spiritual sense” (Husserl, 1954/1970, p. 188). For intersubjectivity there is no prerequisite of a “theory of mind” and no cognitive structure or other capacity that must be in place beyond the need to recognise that as human beings they share the life-world.

Intersubjectivity and autism

What emerges from the phenomenological account of intersubjectivity is that “mind” is not a property of the individual, neither is it reducible to the biological mechanics of the brain. For a person to have a conscious mind they must experience other minds with whom they share a life-world and with whom they can establish intersubjectivity. As Stein recognises (1917/1964, p. 100), life experiences must vary between people, and factors that shape the potential for intersubjectivity must include: biological characteristics, age, class, gender, religion, nationality, and cultural background. How well one “knows” a person can also affect how easy it is to work out what is in their mind so that family members and close friends will find it easier than strangers. If these variables affect just how easily intersubjectivity can be established between two minds, people with autism have a further barrier to do with how they experience the world. It is important to note that a problem with traditional phenomenology is the presumption that all minds, however different they are, work in fundamentally the same way. But some people find it easier than others to understand themselves and their own experiences, and some, not necessarily the same people, find it easier than others to understand other people’s experiences. The capacity for intersubjective engagement and empathy is not a constant across human beings and its importance varies between cultural groups. Nonetheless, intersubjectivity and the complex interaction between human beings that relies on being able to grasp what is in the mind of other people is something that is characteristic of human beings. What seems clear from the accounts of people with autism—for example on the Wrong Planet internet forum ⁴ —is that they have conscious minds and do engage with other people intersubjectively despite difficulties in sustaining communication and finding a common perspective on the life-world.

Noting the role that empathy plays in Karl Jaspers’ psychotherapy, Matthew Ratcliffe explores the potential for “radical empathy” as a strategy to connect with people despite apparent variations in how they experience the life-world: “empathising with others involves suspending, to varying degrees, a world of norms, roles, artefact functions and various other contents. Phenomenologically speaking, this … is to stop presupposing aspects of what is more usually given as our world” (2012, p. 478). The strategy he adopts recognises how psychiatric conditions such as depression or schizophrenia alter or transform the life-world. People with autism often find it difficult to understand some of the practices and habits of “neurotypicals” ⁵ and many people find the way people with autism behave or deal with the world to be strange. From both directions an approach of “radical empathy” would increase the capacity to engage in intersubjectivity more successfully. It is in effect what those people with autism who “get by” successfully in the social world do as they learn by a conscious effort to accept the world as others see it. As Ratcliffe puts it: “Radical empathy, like empathy more generally, incorporates a stance of openness to others, a willingness to be affected by them, to have one’s own experience shaped by them” (2012, p. 488).

In one exchange on Wrong Planet a person without autism responded to questions from people with autism to explain how she copes in social situations with people whom she doesn’t know and does not share any interests with:

If I’m in a positive upbeat mood, the mere feeling of connectedness can get me interested in the topic. My feeling of connectedness precedes my interest. I’ve found out about all sorts of things I never knew could interest me from bass fishing to house flipping. The connectedness leads to interest in the topic.

When people with autism ask how this type of socialising works, she said:

What causes the feeling of connectedness in the first place? That we’re all just people … in general, it really is a we’re-all-just-humans-here connection.

For some of those with autism who added comments, the idea of being “just human” is not enough as a basis for connectedness or for social chit-chat to be comfortable. The presumption of a shared life-world, of “people-in-general,” is not felt in the same way and simply cannot provide the basis for intersubjectivity on its own. What is interesting about the exchanges on Wrong Planet is the curiosity of those with autism about how they might interact with other people to establish intersubjectivity. Here are some of the remarks of people with autism trying to work out how to connect more fully or more easily with other people:

Most of the time I can’t think of anything to say or contribute (sometimes I think I’m actually detracting from the conversation and don’t know how to contribute). It’s like I was born without the ability to relate to people. I keep second guessing myself as to what their interests are and the result is usually negative unless we naturally hit it off.

A lot of times I meet NT [neurotypical] women that are nice and all but they misinterpret my cold gaze and lack of social congruency as stand offish and insecure, and thus refuse to date me.

Why are things so unclear? I spend much time after interactions with people, trying to decipher the true meanings—the subtexts and the subtleties. This has led to lifelong confusion in any kind of relationships with people.

I deeply envy this ability to find enjoyment in talking to anyone. I don’t feel any connection to people just because they’re human. Maybe this is wrong but often I just look at someone and intuitively judge that I have nothing in common or that they will be unintelligent and boring to talk to.

The interchange on the forum between people with autism and those without (often the relatives or partners of people with autism) shows that the “community of monads” which Husserl writes of is not evenly experienced. The conscious minds of people with autism have a different orientation, an intentionality that is difficult to “pair” with those who are not autistic. There is a considerable degree of apperception and embodied co-experience between people with autism and those without, but finding sufficient common ground for empathy such that the life-world of the other person becomes appresent, is clearly more difficult. It is important to notice that this lack of mutual empathic understanding, of being able to put oneself in the shoes of the other, goes both ways; those without autism also have difficulty grasping the life-worlds of people with autism.

There is some remarkable writing by people with autism that helps explain their experiences. For example, Donna Williams describes the difficulty of communicating with those around her, including her family, when she was a child: “Deep down, Donna never learned to communicate. Anything that I felt in the present still had either to be denied or expressed in a form of conversation others called waffling, chattering, babbling or ‘wonking’. I called it ‘talking in poetry’” (D. Williams, 1992, p. 47). Part of her way of coping was to become other personalities who had ways of communicating and presenting themselves, which worked to some degree, but in later life she reflected that the problems with communication were fundamentally emotional. Explaining that an otherwise normal body and normal mind is left with a limited ability to express itself because of a problem with establishing close emotional attachments she says: “the child creates within itself what it perceives as missing and in effect becomes a world within itself to which all else is simply irrelevant, external and redundant” (1992, p. 182). There is no reason to believe that Williams’ particular experience of autism is typical but, for example, in a way that resonates with other accounts she describes how sounds or lights can become so intense as to destroy meaning in interaction “leaving the listener with no emotional cues” so that the “meaning behind the significance of social rules can be completely lost” and the “meanings of words drops away leaving the listener lost as to both concept and significance” (1992, pp. 186–187). An emotional connection with other people is the basis for being able to empathise with them and for what is present for them to become appresent for oneself—meaningful interaction is the beginning of that connection.

Temple Grandin, another writer on the experience of autism, lists the sorts of characteristics observable in a child with autism: “no speech or abnormal speech, lack of eye contact, frequent temper tantrums, oversensitivity to touch, the appearance of deafness, a preference for being alone, rocking or other rhythmic stereotypical behaviour, aloofness and lack of social contact with siblings” (1995/2006, p. 35). The focus of identifying and supporting people with autism remains on the practical level and interactional problems that are summed up in the “triad of impairments”—interaction, communication, and imagination—first identified by Wing and Gould (1979). The DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association, 2013) has merged “autism” and “Asperger’s disorder” under a diagnosis that identifies the autism spectrum through two broad types of behaviour— “persistent impairment in reciprocal social communication and interaction” and “restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour, interests, or activities” (p. 53). The diagnosis covers a wide range of degrees of difficulty across the age range from birth and includes “deficits in social-emotional reciprocity” and hyper- or hypo-sensory responses. But it also recognises the “highly restricted, fixated interests” and “insistence on sameness” that reflect the particular intentionality of some autistic minds, sometimes revealing talents that are impressive and recognised by many people.

Certain aspects of social interaction such as making polite conversation with strangers, making jokes, using idiomatic or euphemistic language can be difficult for people with autism. Maintaining the appropriate degree of eye contact (“the look”), establishing rapport, and finding a shared perspective (“apperception”) can be problematic—intersubjectivity exists but the means of connectivity, of mutually recognising each other, are not easy to establish. The title of the internet forum Wrong Planet nicely describes the cultural strangeness that “neurotypical” society has for many people with autism. The life-worlds of people with autism also often seem strange to those without autism, but being in the minority it is those with autism who are made to feel like strangers who have ended up in the wrong place by accident. The idea of a shared “life-world” in which the commonality of experience can be taken for granted does not work for people with autism in the same way as it does most of the time for those who do not have autism. Changes in routines, sensations, and experiences that are welcomed by many people can be anxiety inducing and distressing to those with autism. How autism is experienced clearly varies a lot, both in the way it manifests in the individual and the degree to which it interferes with social interaction. The anxieties and distress of the periodic experiential dissonance with the life-world of others that Donna Williams describes must be very painful but over their life course many people with autism develop, as she has, strategies for coping and find ways of communicating with people who orient differently to the world than they do (1992, p. 187). The programmes of support, therapy, and advice for people with autism (and particularly the parents of children with autism) often involve identifying the particular sorts of problems the person is facing and helping them to find a way to cope in the situations where they arise (Lawson, 2001).

Conclusions

The theory of “theory of mind” and its companion ideas of “mindreading” (Baron-Cohen, 1995) and “mentalizing” (Frith, 2003) as discussed in relation to autism, have been very provocative as a way of trying to understand philosophically what is distinctive about human consciousness. However, the cognitivist perspective conflates the brain, a bio-chemical organ in the body, with the mind, which expresses the humanity of the person as a whole in its particular social and biographical context. It is striking that those who have written about autism from a personal or experiential perspective have shown little or no interest in ToM (e.g., Grandin, 1995/2006; Lawson, 2001; D. Williams, 1996). Rather than “reading” or “mentalizing” what is in someone’s mind they are more likely to be trying to find common interests and understanding with the people around them and coping with the stress and anxiety of sensory overload or particular types of situations. One of the problems with ToM was that at an average verbal mental age of 5 years 5 months, a fifth of children with autism could successfully pass the “false belief” test but when it was repeated with older children even more were successful. They had learnt how to spot social cues and become better at interactions because communication is, for all humans, a way of sharing experiences and increasing the mutual understanding that constitutes intersubjectivity (McGuire & Michalko, 2011). As Husserl recognised, humanity varies and while for each person “I myself am the primal norm,” it is also the case that “harmoniousness is preserved also by virtue of recasting apperceptions through distinguishing between normality and abnormalities” (1929–1950/1999, p. 126). The phenomenological approach to being in two minds accepts the primordial nature of the experience a person has of their own mind and the secondary and possibly incorrect or incomplete interpretation of what is in someone else’s mind.

Baron-Cohen’s work has developed in the direction of trying to understand “empathy” and show that a shortfall in “affective empathy” may explain sex differences as well as some of the real experiences of people with autism (2004). At the start he plainly states his theory: “The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems” (Baron-Cohen, 2004, p. 1). The argument progresses from the average tendency of women and men to be either empathisers or systematisers, to the claim that: “Autism is an empathy disorder; those with autism have major difficulties in ‘mindreading’ or putting themselves into someone else’s shoes, imagining the world through someone else’s eyes and responding appropriately to someone else’s feelings” (2004, p. 137). This way of theorising treats the mind as a brain but even more narrowly, uses the metaphor of “hard-wiring” as if its structure was set from birth. The metaphor is clumsy because the capacity of electronic digital devices can always be modified with a revised operating system or a new programme or application. There is also good evidence that something similar happens with biological brains as neuroscientists begin to understand how brains that have been damaged—by a stroke for example—adapt and relearn capacities and functions using a different part of the organ. Training can also bring about structural changes in the brain; London cabbies have for example been shown to have an enlarged hippocampus (the area of the brain that deals with space; Draganski & May, 2008; Maguire et al., 2000). The concept of “neuroplasticity” (Lillard & Erisir, 2011) helps to understand how adaptable the brain is and how flexible its biomechanics can be in responding to the demands of a mind. The link between sex and autism is also unlikely to be as biologically determined as Baron-Cohen suggests because evidence is beginning to accumulate that it goes undiagnosed in girls and women because the behavioural cues may be different. ⁶ It seems more appropriate to think of the collection of symptoms, behaviours, and experiences of autism as variations in the mind that can shape tendencies in behaviour rather than as indicators of an underlying biological form (Jaarsma & Welin, 2012; Leiter, 2007; Robertson, 2010).

There is an overlap with the role of empathy between the ToM account of mind as developed by Baron-Cohen (although it was specifically excluded in the original ToM theory) and the phenomenological account of a mind in Husserl’s work. But in the ToM account, being able to imagine oneself in the situation of the “other” is reduced to a cognitive function in the persistent biological determinism used to explain essential differences between human beings. The phenomenological account of being in two minds makes no presumptions about the brain or its capacities beyond being able to recognise similarities—and differences—between the present mind of the ego subject and the appresent mind of the other. Autistic minds may be able to focus on and recall detail, facts, and systems much better than most, they may have a facility with rules and categories and an understanding of material objects or animals that is beyond most people. It seems that the intentionality of autistic minds, the directedness of their consciousness, is oriented differently with less focus on achieving the emotional connectivity of intersubjectivity with other human beings. The effect may be much more serious in its consequences for everyday life than other limitations of mind such as difficulties in learning foreign languages, manipulating objects in three-dimensional space, or grasping mathematical concepts (all abilities that can vary considerably between people). But like those limitations it may be practical to learn or adapt, to get by for practical purposes and as with those limitations, the understanding and support of other people can help in the process. The shortfall of the cognitive psychological approach to minds is that in assuming a biological origin, the only real help that can be offered is either brain surgery to alter the “wiring” or drug therapy that will achieve some measure of restructuring of biochemical processes within the body. The irony of cognitive psychology is that it is most effective as philosophy whereas phenomenology is of more use for understanding the practical experience and action of the mind.