Sydney Maxwell

Autistic speakers commonly report feelings of being misunderstood. Where communication is concerned, such misunderstandings manifest when the communicative intentions of an autist—i.e., an autistic person—are misinterpreted by their interlocutor(s). While in some cases this can lead to seemingly benign kinds of miscommunication, such as when someone takes what was intended as a genuine assertion or question as a joke, the same basic phenomenon can also lead to illegitimate criticism of the autist—e.g., for being ‘rude’ or ‘weird’. I argue that such misunderstandings, given their frequency, cause serious harm to members of the autistic community and propose that the frequency of autists being so misunderstood can be explained by a sort of intellectual arrogance often exhibited by allistic (non-autistic) interlocutors. Allistic speakers have a tendency to smuggle certain assumptions into the conversational backdrop because they take these assumptions to simply be matters of ‘common sense’. Yet—as far as I am aware—no principled, much less predictive, account has been provided to explain where such assumptions are actually coming from. My suggestion is that the dogmatic way that allistic speakers tend to rely on their ‘common sense’ assumptions in the interpretation of conversational exchanges opens them up to misunderstanding the intentions of others in potentially harmful ways.

Leading expressivist proposals characterize the mental state expressed in the making of a normative judgment solely in terms of intrinsic, psychological dispositions. As a result, they fail to capture a subset of the normative judgments that agents can and do make; they miss the way that external factors can influence what the making of a normative judgment looks like. This problem can be seen most plainly in the context of systemic oppression. Intuitively, one can make a normative judgment that conflicts with the oppressive ideas one has previously been conditioned to endorse, but expressivism seems to deny that this is possible. The expressivist's inability to count these avowals made under oppression as genuine normative judgments makes expressivism deficient as a metaethical theory.