• Streetlight
    9.1k


    I encourage everyone here to take a moment and watch the following video by Amanda Baggs. Titled "In My Langauge", the video itself is split into two parts, the first a sort of evocative display of the experience of autism, the second, Baggs's own "interpretation" of what's happening in the first part. The first part may seem a bit jarring, if not confusing, but it's worth the wait.

    I've always been curious about with the rhythmic quality of the movements of those who we tend to consider mentally disabled. You tend to see it quite often, a certain continuous rocking or gentle swaying exhibited by those like Baggs, which can seem, to those of us not so affected, to be aimless or wandering. Yet I've always wondered if there is in fact a particular significance to such rhythms, rhythms which might, perhaps, help with maintaining a certain bodily integrity by capturing a duration of space and time in a comforting cadence without which a sense of self might begin to unravel, or at least feel less concrete.

    --

    Baggs's video, I think, articulates something similar in a far better way then I could have. Especially interesting is her specification of her movements in terms of language. "The previous part of this video", says Baggs, referring to the three wordless minutes that precede her 'interpretation', "was in my native language." For us neurotypicals, the idea that Baggs's rhythmic bodily repetitions could constitute language might come off as particularly strange. Language, as we are used to thinking of it, is matter of 'symbolizing', of being something to interpret and understand. Yet for Baggs, her language works differently: "My language is not about designing words or even visual symbols for people to interpret. It is about being in a constant conversation with every aspect of my environment, reacting physically to all parts of my surroundings". In a voice over a clip of Baggs running her fingers through flowing water, Baggs says, "the water doesn't symbolize anything. I am just interacting with the water, as the water interacts with me".

    Language for Baggs is not a matter of communicating between one person and another, but between a person - in this case Baggs - and their environment. Importantly she notes that "far from being purposeless, the way that I move is an ongoing response to what is around me." So how are we to understand the manner in which Baggs can be said to be communicating or responding to her environment? Baggs helps to clarify this by noting that the difference between neurotypical communication and the sort of communication she is detailing is a matter of scope: "Ironically, the way that I move when responding to everything around me is described as 'being in a world of my own'. Whereas if I interact with a much more limited set of responses and only react to a much more limited part of my surroundings people claim that I am 'opening up to true interaction with the world'." Neurotypical communication is in fact a communication that proceeds by way of certain constraints - that of grammar, social convention, vocalization or graphic , inter-subjectivity, etc; while Baggs's own manner of communication is a communication undertaken with far looser constraints.

    What interests me here is not just what this says about autistic experience - although this fascinates me too - but also what it says about so-called normal communication. What Baggs's experience allows us to do is rethink what we traditionally understand as the 'normal order' of communication; Autistic experience is often taken to be a sort of degraded form of experience, wherein normal experience is taken to be standard which the autist has failed to reach. What Baggs's experience shows however, is that autistic experience is in fact a type of experience with it's own standard of consistency and specificity. Baggs, who can only speak though typed words on a computer, is clearly an articulate, thoughtful and insightful person. Her ability to think and communicate however, is not a degraded form of experience so much as an experience that belongs to a different order. As she herself writes, "the way that I naturally think and respond to things looks and feels so different from standard concepts or even visualization that some people do not consider it thought at all but it is a way of thinking in its own right".

    By underscoring the difference between autistic and neurotypical communication as a matter of scope, Baggs essentially places both experiences on a continuum that runs from a highly constrained manner of communication to one far less so. Interestingly, it is precisely the constraints placed on neurotypical communication that make it so highly varied and capable of semantic precision. In any case, this allows Baggs to draw a certain equivalency between the two, as she does when she complains that "we are... viewed as non-communicative if we don’t speak the standard language but other people are not considered non-communicative if they are so oblivious to our own languages as to believe that they don’t exist." Philosophically speaking, Baggs forces us to reconsider our complacencies with respect to the scope of what does and does not count as meaningful, as well as the boundaries we draw between self and other. Baggs's own take-away is at once both ethical and political, a takeaway that reminds us of the responsibilities we have when engaging in what we may think only of as abstract thought.
  • bert1
    1.8k
    I enjoyed your sympathetic treatment of this, Street. Life would be better for autistics if more NTs were as understanding as you are here. There has been research suggesting that autistic people do not (or cannot) filter sensory input in the way NTs do and so are exposed to a far higher volume of information to process and get overloaded and can't cope way more quickly than NTs. Similarly, autistics tend not to make assumptions, which relates to taking things literally and difficulty with some metaphors and so on, and so require additional explicit information to fully understand what is going on from an NT perspective. I haven't actually looked at the vid yet but will do later.
  • Streetlight
    9.1k
    There has been research suggesting that autistic people do not (or cannot) filter sensory input in the way NTs do and so are exposed to a far higher volume of information to process and get overloaded and can't cope way more quickly than NTs.bert1

    This makes sense to me, both from a phenomenological perspective - Baggs writes alot about overload on her blog - and in terms of the language of constraints that I've tried to employ above. When Baggs writes of how people tend to only engage with a limited part of the world, these limits are themselves derived from an ability to parse differences amongst an environment. One can put this in terms of background/foreground relations. It's possible to say that our engagements with the world largely take place by backgrounding a great deal of the environment around in order to engage with specific, foregrounded elements; this book, that computer screen, this path, that noise. For those like Baggs, this relationship is reversed; the primary experience is one in which the background is in some sense foregorounded, as when she says that she is in "a constant conversation with every aspect of my environment, reacting physically to all parts of my surroundings."

    In some sense, Baggs's self-experience is not one which separates her from her environment as an agent-acting-in-an-external-surrouding, but one in which is she is part and parcel of the environment. Erin Manning, the philosopher whose writings lead me to Baggs's video, writes of how "autistics do not tend first and foremost to abstract themselves - their "self" - from the emergent environment... it is this intensive relationally, the video suggests, that often makes it difficult for autistics to interact with others." In one of her blog posts, Baggs describes the perplexity she is faced with when she is asked what she is thinking, and the inability for alot of people to appreciate her answer: “The dark behind my eyelids. The sensation of pressure on my arms. The sound of rustling.” To which the reply is: "[But] that’s a feeling. What were you thinking?". For Baggs however, "As far as I’m concerned, processing sensory input, including emotional responses from inside my body, are part of thinking. They are the main part of my thinking, at that. Yes, I do have the kind of thoughts that everyone calls thinking, but not all the time. Not most of the time... That kind of thought takes work and work takes energy... So that’s yet another common assumption: That everyone uses that standard kind of thinking. So much so that many people (including many people like me) decide that my predominant way of thinking isn’t thinking."

    Yet just as her language is of another order, so too is her thinking. Like her language, her thinking also constitutes a positive modality which, to a large degree, we do not have access too. The primacy of background is not something we tend to experience. Autistic 'overload' is what takes place when this residency amongst the background is broken, when too much is foregrounded and the relation to the background is broken. Again, the point is to be careful with instituting a hierarchy of experiential categorization. Baggs's experience breaks the sort of input/output model of sensory experience that we tend to take for granted. The demarcations that would make a division between an inside and an outside are not necessarily present until certain exigencies make them arise. Manning for her part writes thus of the way in which Baggs's rhythmic movements don't take place in an environment so much as with an environment, co-emerging along with it.
  • Baden
    15.6k
    Thanks for this @StreetlightX. It's provocative to reflect that while autistics suffer from a degraded form of interpersonal communication, that may be just what allows them to experience an enhanced form of extrapersonal communication. So, it could well be that the extralinguistic deficiencies of we NTs reflect a gradual evolutionary trade-off between being in the world and being in the world of others, a trade-off that autism somehow circumvents. I think of Temple Grandin, the well-known autistic Professor of Animal Science, who claims that words are her second language, and maybe there's a sense in which words are the second language of all of us, our first language having become more and more marginalized in the face of sustained evolutionary and sociocultural pressures. This underlines again the argument that philosophical theories of language that fail to address the origins and groundings of their subject matter can be of no lasting interest.
  • bert1
    1.8k
    It's provocative to reflect that while autistics suffer from a degraded form of interpersonal communication, that may be just what allows them to experience an enhanced form of extrapersonal communication.Baden

    :) You'd get boo'd off the stage for that at Autscape! For many autistics, myself included, NT interpersonal communication seems dysfunctional and degraded. On so many occasions I have written an email to an NT person containing, say, three questions. They answer none of them, and ask me a question instead. This seems like a straightforward communication disability, and it is the norm. Heck, this shit was routine on PF and drove me nuts. You just can't have a proper conversation like that. On the other hand, my email communication with other autistics is crystal clear. I ask three questions, and I get three answers, even if all three answers are 'I don't know' or 'I don't know what you are asking'. This is first class interpersonal communication.
  • Baden
    15.6k
    Point taken, bert. :)
  • bert1
    1.8k
    The view you expressed is perfectly understandable. It's the standard view. Autism is generally (but not universally) thought of by non-autistic researchers, doctors, psychiatrists in terms of straightforward malfunctions and deficits. I only know differently because I've been involved with autistic self-advocates and Autscape.
  • Michael
    14k
    Sometimes answering a question with another question is more useful. An obvious example is in the classroom; when asked a question the teacher could either give the answer or respond with a question that allows the student to solve the problem themselves. The latter is probably the better approach.

    And in the case of a philosophy discussion, there's a reason the Socratic method is a thing. With the right questions you could get your interlocutor to agree with you of his own accord.

    On so many occasions I have written an email to an NT person containing, say, three questions. They answer none of them, and ask me a question instead. This seems like a straightforward communication disability, and it is the norm.

    A common occurrence in my life is asking a client if they want A or B and they answer with "Yes".
  • Jamal
    9.1k
    On so many occasions I have written an email to an NT person containing, say, three questions. They answer none of them, and ask me a question instead. This seems like a straightforward communication disability, and it is the norm. Heck, this shit was routine on PF and drove me nuts. You just can't have a proper conversation like that. On the other hand, my email communication with other autistics is crystal clear. I ask three questions, and I get three answers, even if all three answers are 'I don't know' or 'I don't know what you are asking'. This is first class interpersonal communication.bert1

    For you it is.

    Here's what this sounds like to me bert. Imagine a community of people called the lefters who have only one arm, the left one, and they walk around wearing capes so that nobody can see their disability. One of them says...

    On so many occasions I have met a BT (brachiotypical) person, and most of the time they offer their right hand. This seems like a straightforward social disability, and it is the norm. You just can't shake hands properly like that. On the other hand, my handshakes with other lefters are always perfect. I meet one and they always offer their left hand. This is first class interpersonal etiquette. — A. Lefter

    It is not always good communication to answer every question that is asked, and a response that ignores the questions completely may still be a good way of taking the conversation forward, allowing the questioner to see that the questions were misplaced, or trying to tackle things from a different angle. And from the questioner's standpoint, a response that doesn't directly answer their questions but nevertheless shows a deep insight into what they have said can be more satisfying; I often find point-by-point responses pedantic and facile. Granted, this way of responding may not work for everyone, may be difficult for some people to understand, and is sometimes open to abuse, but that doesn't make it "second class".

    I'm sorry if this would get me boo'd off the stage at Autscape.
  • Marchesk
    4.6k
    Maybe people engaged in philosophical discussion deliberately choose to not answer questions as a debate tactic. Or they don't like your questions and would rather ask you a question back. Or perhaps they see your questions as an attempt to frame the debate in a way favoring your position.

    These are all common strategies in any discussion forum across the net. Often times questions are asked in an attempt to force a poster to answer a certain way. But most posters are smart enough to see through that.
  • mcdoodle
    1.1k
    The OP made me have a look at the material by and about Amanda Baggs. She certainly performs as an autisticc; there seems some legitimate doubt about her own credentials and accordingly whether self-defining yourself thus is to be thus.

    Even if it's just performance, though, it works as a way of expressing the notions that gesture, movement, sound are all of a piece, and might make sense in a way that is often disregarded.

    What is odd though is that in the video only an indifferent dog is visibly in 'the audience'. Language as communication with the environment strikes me as having its narcissistic side. I didn't see a claim in her video that her non-verbal 'language' communicated to or with her fellow-autistics.

    People are always going on about speaker-meaning and much more rarely about hearer-meaning. For me language makes sense in that it's understood by someone other than the speaker. Otherwise it would be making a 'private language' claim, wouldn't it?
  • bert1
    1.8k
    For you it is.

    Here's what this sounds like to me bert. Imagine a community of people called the lefters who have only one arm, the left one, and they walk around wearing capes so that nobody can see their disability. One of them says...

    On so many occasions I have met a BT (brachiotypical) person, and most of the time they offer their right hand. This seems like a straightforward social disability, and it is the norm. You just can't shake hands properly like that. On the other hand, my handshakes with other lefters are always perfect. I meet one and they always offer their left hand. This is first class interpersonal etiquette.
    — A. Lefter
    jamalrob

    Sure. This shows that there are two groups of people with different cultures, needs, abilities, etc. The narrative is that autistics are deficient on NT terms, which is true. The opposite narrative is also true, that NTs are deficient on autistic terms. Consider this:

    Neurotypical syndrome is a neurobiological disorder characterized by preoccupation with social concerns, delusions of superiority, and obsession with conformity.

    It is not always good communication to answer every question that is asked, and a response that ignores the questions completely may still be a good way of taking the conversation forward, allowing the questioner to see that the questions were misplaced, or trying to tackle things from a different angle.

    Not with philosophy. You can do both, answer questions and change the subject if you want. Not answering questions is just rude. Also, saying "That's the wrong question" is extremely offensive. Questions can't be wrong. It's implying that the questioner doesn't know what they are themselves interested in. A question defines what someone wants to talk about, and can't be wrong.

    And from the questioner's standpoint, a response that doesn't directly answer their questions but nevertheless shows a deep insight into what they have said can be more satisfying; I often find point-by-point responses pedantic and facile. Granted, this way of responding may not work for everyone, may be difficult for some people to understand, and is sometimes open to abuse, but that doesn't make it "second class".

    Again, you can do both. You can respect the questioner by answering their question, and then you can go on to make whatever deep point you like. Or if there really is no mileage in answering the question, or you don't know how to answer it, you can say so. At least that isn't completely ignoring someone's interests.

    I'm sorry if this would get me boo'd off the stage at Autscape.

    I don't think it would as long as you acknowledged that there is an equally valid autistic culture.
  • bert1
    1.8k
    Maybe people engaged in philosophical discussion deliberately choose to not answer questions as a debate tactic.Marchesk

    In which case they are not doing philosophy and have no business on a philosophy forum.

    Or they don't like your questions and would rather ask you a question back.

    Well, that's just psychotic, or at least rude.

    Or perhaps they see your questions as an attempt to frame the debate in a way favoring your position.

    But we can address that while answering the question. Good philosophers would welcome questions that favour an opinion contrary to their own. It gives them something to argue about.

    These are all common strategies in any discussion forum across the net. Often times questions are asked in an attempt to force a poster to answer a certain way. But most posters are smart enough to see through that.

    Well if they are smart enough to see through that they are smart enough to answer the question and make the points they want to make. Non-engagement is anti-social, and anti-philosophical. It might be appropriate on a forum dedicated to sophistry, but not on a philosophy forum.

    If we think non-answering of questions is OK, we get a situation in which people fail to philosophically interact.
  • bert1
    1.8k
    I've watched the video now, thanks for linking to it. It's a great look into an autistic person's life. I did wonder if she was hamming it up slightly, but that doesn't really matter if true.

    I have some sympathy with mcdoodle's take on it.
  • Marchesk
    4.6k
    In which case they are not doing philosophy and have no business on a philosophy forum.bert1

    Maybe you miss the part where people like to argue.
  • bert1
    1.8k
    The essence of arguing is listening to and responding in good faith to points people make and questions they ask. What you are describing is not arguing, but rhetoric.
  • Marchesk
    4.6k
    I would say the essence of arguing is trying to win the argument, usually because you think your position is right, and the opposing one is wrong.
  • bert1
    1.8k
    What constitutes 'winning'?
  • Marchesk
    4.6k
    I said "try to win", since I'm referring to your average contentious discussion anywhere online. Try, because there isn't really winning, not in the official sense, but posters can declare themselves the winner, and they can gain reputation amongst other posters. Or it could just be a matter of telling oneself that attacks from the opposing view point were fended off.
  • bert1
    1.8k
    Indeed, you did say 'try to win'. And I said:

    "What constitutes winning?"

    Which you ignored. This is classic NT behaviour.
  • Marchesk
    4.6k
    LOL, because your question missed the point, as does your complaint. Most online discussions aren't simply an exchange of information and viewpoints (how very "AT"), rather they are informal debates between different positions and/or feuding posters, which involve all sorts of strategies.
  • Marchesk
    4.6k
    Also, I'd like to point out that your question was an attempt at defending your position by pressing mine. But I didn't really ignore your question. I just corrected it by emphasizing the try part, which is what people are doing when they argue, whether online or in person. It's not like anyone is keeping score, but people still argue their POV.
  • bert1
    1.8k
    I don't care what most online discussions are. This is a philosophy forum. Doing philosophy is exactly an exchange of of information and viewpoints. This being very AT is a point in favour of AT communication on a philosophy forum. Saying your (non)-communication is classically NT is on topic in a thread about autistic communication.

    So, lets try again,

    What constitutes winning?

    What are we doing here? Feuding, arguing or sophistry?
  • bert1
    1.8k
    Also, I'd like to point out that your question was an attempt at defending your position by pressing mine.Marchesk

    Was it? How do you know?
  • bert1
    1.8k
    How is it possible to correct a question?
  • Marchesk
    4.6k
    So, lets try again,

    What constitutes winning?
    bert1

    I already gave you an answer. You don't like it, okay. *shrug*
  • Marchesk
    4.6k
    I don't care what most online discussions are.bert1

    So you expect people to be different just because the topic is philosophy? (That's a rhetorical question).

    Doing philosophy is exactly an exchange of of information and viewpoints.bert1

    Is it? Is that what professional philosophers do? Or do they also advance their own positions?

    An exchange of information is wikipedia or SEP.
  • Marchesk
    4.6k
    How is it possible to correct a question?bert1

    Easy. You tell the person they asked the wrong question, or phrased it incorrectly.
  • Marchesk
    4.6k
    Was it? How do you know?bert1

    Really? That's answering a question with a question.
  • Marchesk
    4.6k
    What are we doing here? Feuding, arguing or sophistry?bert1

    So many questions! Personally, I like to argue topics that interest me. Feuding happens sometimes with certain posters as a result. Particularly if you're always arguing opposing views.

    It's still informative, and sometimes I'm forced to reevaluate my thinking. Also the shock a Landru or a TGW gives the system can be enjoyable.
  • Marchesk
    4.6k
    What constitutes winning?

    What are we doing here? Feuding, arguing or sophistry?
    bert1

    Actually I have a better answer. You can think of it as verbal sparring. People sharpen up their positions going toe to toe with each other. And in the process, they learn.
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