Autism, Dilogic and Persons

The syndrome of autism was first systematically
identified in the 1940's (Kanner 1943), and has been the
focus of a broad range of work since that time (Rutter
1999). Its symptomatology is seemingly diverse, and
involves a rough division between 'personal' and 'nonpersonal'
tendencies. In the personal category are
difficulties in understanding and interacting with other
persons, socialisation, empathy and communication. In the
non-personal category are difficulties in adaptability,
occasional special abilities, and a wide range of
peculiarities in learning, generalisation, pursuit of narrow
interests, and so on. Some tendencies, such as
peculiarities in the use of language, seem to span both
categories.
A central question in the theory of autism,
therefore, is whether these two categories of impairment
share a common pattern or character. It is true that
received sets of diagnostic criteria (World Health
Organisation 1993; American Psychiatric Association
1994), drawn from empirical observation, give the
impression of a split syndrome in which non-personal and
personal tendencies occur together but are different in
nature. However, we cannot simply trust the language
games which inform the presentation of these
observations: as Wittgenstein repeatedly argued, forms of
words and 'analogies in language' can have the effect of
obscuring both similarities and differences between things
(Peterson 1990). The main thesis of the present paper is
that there does exist a pattern common to these two areas
of impairment, in that both involve dilogical structures.