The contrast between third- and first-personal accounts of the experiences of autistic persons has much to teach us about epistemic injustice and epistemic agency. In doing so, we shed light on a type of epistemic injustice that might be missing from the epistemic injustice literature: cognitive injustices. Considering that human cognition depends on epistemic resources, both for their construction (diachronic dependence) and their online dynamic expression (synchronic dependence), we hypothesize that the differential access to epistemic resources in society, a form of epistemic injustice, is an overlooked mechanism that turns neurodiversity into neurodivergence. First, we extend the traditional concept of neurodiversity, which we believe too closely tied to a neuroreductionist conception of cognition, to that of “extended neurodiversity,” thereby viewing neurodiversity through the lens of 4E (i.e., embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive) cognition. , 2018), we call “epistemic and cognitive marginalization”. In this paper, we describe the socio-political mechanisms that build neurodivergence out of neurodiversity which, inspired by Mihai (Contemp Polit Theory 17(4):395–416. Neurodivergent individuals are those whose cognitive profile diverges from an established cognitive norm, a norm that is not an objective statistical fact of human neurological functioning but a standard established and maintained by socio-political processes. Neurodivergence is, we claim here, a fact of society. To make the difference clear, note that everyone can be said to be neurodiverse, but that it is almost impossible for everyone to be neurodivergent. If neurodiversity is a fact of nature, what about neurodivergence? Although the terms “neurodiversity” and “neurodivergence” are sometimes used interchangeably, this is, we believe, a mistake: “neurodiversity” is a term of inclusion whereas “neurodivergence” is a term of exclusion. Wiley, Hoboken, 2004), and there is now evidence that nature did not stop generating diversity just before “designing” the human brain (Joel et al.
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In this context, autism inter-ventions should partly focus on the development of social policies aimed at modifying those aspects of cultural niches that make environments unsuitable for the full development of all individuals.ĭiversity is an undeniable fact of nature (Gaston and Spicer in Biodiversity: an introduction. This mismatch leads to epistemic injustices, both testimonial and hermeneutic, that feed back into research on autism and clinical approaches, thereby making the “deficits” appear based on individual shortcomings. By adopting a predictive 4E perspective, we aim to show that the “cognitive deficits” associated with autism are in fact mismatches between environmental resources and the particular form of neurological functioning of autistic people (neurodiversity), brought about by the fact that the cultural niches that set up the relevant fields of affordances are structured by and for neurotypicals. Such models force us to reassess what “cognitive deficit” means by integrating the environment not only in its usual sense (evo-developmental), but by un-derstanding all cognitive performances as embedded in environments (or fields of affordances) that shape and sustain them. We will use predictive models within a 4E (i.e., embodied, embedded, enactive and extended) conception of cognition to address the question of cognitive impairment in psychiatrics and autism.
As recent developments in autism research offer alternative explanations to the mainstream options, it can now be argued that the so-called cognitive deficits in the social domain associated with autism have been mischaracterized or, at least, oversimplified.
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