He takes issue with my critique of the DSM IV's definition of autism in "See If You Can Find the Science" which I also sent out over the swansa list:
"I fully appreciate the skepticism with which you view this 'definition' of autism, but I think to make the discussion truly constructive, we need to consider what other options there are for describing a phenomenon that is not that well understood."
My response:
The option I propose is simple enough. Acknowledge that autism is a fuzzy category like black, white, straight, gay, conservative or any other descriptive term we use to define and categorize people in everyday conversation. When homosexuality was a "disorder" it was left to "experts" to decide just exactly what constituted a homosexual (was it acts or inclination of some mixture of both?) When homosexuality magically ceased being a DSM-defined disorder in 1973, the term, purged of its pseudo-scientific medical connotations, did not go away. People continued to use it in the non-exacting imprecise way that people use everyday language. In the end, just who is gay or who is a real Jew (or Christian) is a never-ending conversation engaged in by communities made up of those people and those who would be part of it.
Stripping a community or society of its ability to define itself is an act of tyranny.
It is ultimately up to the autistic community to engage in this debate.
And, by the way, who is it who doesn't understand this phenomenon? We on the spectrum understand it. We live with it everyday. At least we understand it as well as you have an understanding of how you think and the assorted quirks and inconsistencies that make up your life. It would be an easy, but relatively empty, exercise to define your non-autistic spectrum breed as a mere collection of deficits and disorders (non-systemic thinking, given easily to crowd psychology) in the same manner that the DSM has arbitrarily defined the autustic. But that would be to buy into the same lazy pseudo-scientific clap trap that the intellectual mediocrities at the Marcus Center and elsewhere engage in every day.
In his reply to mine, Abowd asks that if the autistic community gets to define what they are, then do cancer patients get to define if they have cancer. Variations of this question come up all the time when you are arguing that the DSM's (any and all of its editions) definition of autism and its variations and subsets are empirically unverifiable confabulations.
My response:
Cancer simply is when cells go into uncontrolled growth. It is a clear and easily understood term. It is a condition that is subject to empirical verification.
A discussion of how we recognize disease as disease might be a fascinating one were we to go down that path. Certainly there is a teleological aspect to it. The practitioners of the science of medicine, both past and present, are capable of conceiving of the body in it's platonically idealized form That which interferes with the various parts of the body achieving their purposeful functions is disease. This intellectual shortcut works pretty well because we, as a species, are in rough agreement as to both the nature and the desirability of possessing as fully functional a body as possible.
The application of this same intellectual shortcut to the analysis and classification of behaviors, thoughts, inclinations, beliefs and other aspects of the mind is, on the other hand, a disaster. There is simply no reasonably objective method, nor can there be, for constructing or imagining a platonic ideal for acceptable and unacceptable manifestations of the mind. Time and time again we see that these models of normality are merely reflective of the specific values and prejudices of those constructing the models, hence the inclusion of so many sexual variations as "disordered" in the early editions of the DSM, and the gradual removal of them as the views of society towards sexual deviation has liberalized over the decades.
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