Autism and ASD: Current State of Knowledge and Main Theories Under Discussion

Re-centering the study on autistic functioning and on the interface with non-autism

C.1 — Status of this part

This part explicitly uses concepts and hypotheses developed within Autismology and the Autistan framework.

They are not presented as conclusions already established by the external scientific consensus. They must therefore remain open to discussion, comparison with alternative explanations, empirical testing, and revision.

The purpose is not to replace one dogma with another, but to test what becomes visible when the initial frame of reference is changed.

C.2 — First distinction: autism, disorders, difficulties, and consequences are not synonyms

The central proposal is to distinguish several objects that are often merged in ordinary medical or administrative language:

• autism, understood here as an autistic nature or mode of functioning;
• autistic-specific disorders or difficulties, when a person actually experiences a functional problem;
• associated conditions, such as epilepsy, intellectual disability, anxiety, sleep disorders, pain, or another medical condition;
• disability, which depends partly on the relationship between the person and the environment;
• consequences produced or aggravated by the social, sensory, or institutional environment.

If these levels are placed in a single box from the start, research may then try to find “the cause” of a set whose components do not necessarily have the same cause.

The Autismological proposal is therefore not to deny disorders, disabilities, or suffering. It is to stop treating them automatically as synonyms for autism itself.

C.3 — Changing the central question

Much conventional research begins with the question: what mechanisms produce the clinical characteristics grouped under ASD?

Autismology proposes adding a prior question:

what is autistic functioning, independently of the fact that it was first identified through difficulties?

This changes the research program.

Instead of beginning only with deficits or problematic manifestations, one can study regularities in:

• perception;
• attention;
• information selection;
• precision and detail;
• pattern detection;
• categorization;
• interest and motivation;
• learning;
• coherence;
• relation to explicit and implicit rules;
• need for predictability;
• relation to truth, consistency, and contradiction;
• social interaction.

The aim is not to assume in advance that all autistic people share the same profile. It is to search for mechanisms and regularities without defining them beforehand as defects.

C.4 — Studying non-autism as well

Autism has historically been described from a non-autistic frame of reference.

If autism is defined as a difference relative to majority functioning, then that majority functioning must itself become an object of study.

For example, one can examine:

• the role of implicit conventions;
• tolerance for approximation or inconsistency;
• dependence on social context;
• use of status and hierarchy;
• attribution of intentions;
• conformity to group expectations;
• the way context changes interpretation;
• the balance between literal information and socially expected meaning.

The point is not to pathologize non-autistic people in return. It is to end the methodological asymmetry in which one functioning is treated as transparent and the other as something that must constantly be explained.

C.5 — The interface can produce the visible “disorder”

Some difficulties may arise neither exclusively “inside” the autistic person nor exclusively “inside” society, but in the interaction between forms of functioning.

A direct communication style may work very well between people who value explicitness and become conflictual in an environment that relies heavily on implication, politeness rituals, or inferred intentions.

A strong need for consistency may be highly useful in technical work and become a source of distress in an institution where rules are contradictory or change without explanation.

A sensory sensitivity may have little consequence in a suitable environment and become disabling in a noisy, bright, crowded, or unpredictable one.

This does not make the person or the environment unreal. It changes the causal unit being studied: the phenomenon may belong to the interface.

C.6 — Re-reading perceptual research without imposing deficit first

The EPF model and related findings are particularly useful because they show that some autistic differences may involve increased performance or a different distribution of processing resources.

From an Autismological perspective, the important question is not whether “local processing is better” in absolute terms. It is how information is selected, weighted, and organized.

A greater preservation of detail may:

• help detect errors, regularities, or exact correspondences;
• make some forms of pattern learning easier;
• make it harder to ignore information that is irrelevant to the current goal;
• increase sensory load in complex environments.

The same underlying tendency can therefore have advantages or costs depending on the task and environment.

C.7 — Priors, prediction, and conventions

Bayesian and predictive-processing theories become more informative when the word “prior” is not automatically interpreted as something that should have the same weight in everyone.

In some domains, giving less weight to a prior expectation may keep perception closer to the information actually present. In others, it may increase uncertainty, cognitive cost, or difficulty acting rapidly.

The question becomes especially interesting when the “priors” are social conventions.

If a person does not spontaneously give the same weight to conventions, implications, or group expectations, they may be described as socially atypical. But from the standpoint of the relation to reality, physical reality must be distinguished from the collective convention used to interpret it.

This distinction may help explain why some autistic people sometimes appear very literal or strongly attached to consistency: the issue may not be an absence of understanding, but a different weighting between present data, explicit rules, and implicit social expectations.

C.8 — Categorization: generalizing according to which criteria?

Lower performance in a categorization task does not automatically mean a general inability to form categories.

The criteria for generalization must be examined.

A person may refuse to place two objects together in the same category because they give more weight to differences that the experimenter considers negligible.

In a system that values broad, approximate categories, this may appear as rigidity or over-specificity. In a domain where precise distinctions are essential, the same mechanism may become useful.

Autismology therefore concludes neither general superiority nor general impairment. It seeks to understand which information is preserved, which is neglected, and why.

C.9 — “Enhanced rationality” and coherence

Findings of reduced susceptibility to certain decision biases are interesting because they require abandoning a uniformly deficit-based representation.

They may be compatible with greater stability of some explicit rules or with lower influence of certain contextual framings.

But stronger coherence in one task is not universal rationality. An autistic person may reason very consistently in a formal problem while simultaneously encountering major difficulty in an unpredictable social environment.

The Autismological interest of these studies is therefore to investigate the conditions of coherence, rather than assigning a global quality to an entire group.

C.10 — Double empathy as a change of perspective

The double empathy problem is one of the shifts most compatible with the Autismological approach: it transforms a difficulty that appeared to belong only to the autistic person into a phenomenon of interface.

This does not mean that all social difficulties are symmetrical or that all people misunderstand one another equally. It means that both sides of the interaction must be measured.

This logic can be extended:

• an instruction that is not understood should be examined from the side of the person receiving it and the person formulating it;
• a conflict should be analyzed through the facts, interpretations, and conventions of each participant;
• a situation of “maladaptation” should also be studied from the side of the environment to which adaptation is being demanded.

C.11 — Sensory characteristics, environment, and socio-generated harms

The study of sensory characteristics becomes especially clear when characteristic and harm are distinguished.

A particular sensitivity may belong to the person’s functioning. Suffering, however, may depend on the intensity, duration, and avoidability of the stimulus: air conditioning that is too cold, unnecessary noise, aggressive lighting, smells, unexpected physical contact, crowding, or inability to move away.

Autismology uses the concept of socio-generated harm to analyze damage produced or amplified by a social organization that does not correctly take autistic functioning into account.

This concept does not assume that every difficulty comes from society. It requires reconstructing the causal chain before automatically attributing the difficulty to the person’s “autism.”

C.12 — What should be done with genetic and biological data?

Changing the frame of reference does not mean ignoring biology.

Genetic data may be essential for understanding an associated disease, a syndrome, epilepsy, intellectual disability, a developmental trajectory, or particular biological mechanisms.

The point is not to assume that every association found in a diagnosed population automatically constitutes a “cause of autism.”

Autismological research can instead ask:

• is this variation associated with autistic functioning itself, with an associated condition, or with both?
• does it produce a general developmental difference or a more specific mechanism?
• is the same autistic functioning found in people who do not have this variation?
• is this variation found in people who do not show the functioning being studied?

These questions make genetics more precise rather than rejecting it.

C.13 — A research program centered on mechanisms

An Autismological approach to the state of knowledge could organize research around concrete mechanisms rather than around a single diagnostic category.

For example:

1. identify a regularity of functioning descriptively;
2. test its reproducibility across different people;
3. specify the conditions under which it appears or disappears;
4. distinguish its advantages, costs, and interactions with the environment;
5. investigate possible biological correlates without confusing them with the phenomenon itself;
6. compare the mechanism in autistic and non-autistic people;
7. examine the causal chains linking the mechanism to real difficulties;
8. test environmental adaptations before concluding that there is an intrinsic incapacity.

This strategy would allow competing theories to become sources of partial hypotheses rather than rival doctrines each claiming to explain the whole.

C.14 — A framework for re-reading existing theories

Four questions can be asked of each result or theory.

1. What was actually observed?

The data must be separated from the interpretation.

2. Which population was studied?

Diagnosis, age, language, intellectual disability, sex, associated conditions, context, and inclusion criteria should be made explicit.

3. Which frame of reference turns the result into a “deficit,” “symptom,” or “abnormality”?

Would the same result have a different meaning if the context or task were changed?

4. Which causal chain connects the mechanism to a concrete difficulty?

Characteristic, interaction, environmental harm, associated disorder, and secondary consequence must be distinguished.

This framework makes it possible to retain useful observations without making medical vocabulary the mandatory architecture of all understanding.

C.15 — Toward a simpler, but not simplistic, understanding

The current state of research can make the object appear extraordinarily complicated: hundreds of genes, numerous candidate biomarkers, subtypes, cognitive models, support categories, and partly contradictory theories.

Autismology proposes the hypothesis that some of this complexity may arise because several phenomena are being understood simultaneously under one label.

Separating the levels can make the problem simpler:

• autistic functioning;
• individual variations;
• disorders or associated conditions;
• learning and adaptations;
• interactions with non-autistic functioning;
• environments;
• social and sensory consequences.

Simplification does not mean claiming that one formula explains everything. It means stopping the attempt to make one category explain phenomena that may not belong to the same causal level.

C.16 — Conclusion

Existing scientific knowledge contains many important observations. Autismology has no interest in rejecting them; it has an interest in placing them within a conceptual architecture that distinguishes the objects being studied more clearly.

From this perspective, the question is no longer only: “which theory explains autism?”

It becomes:

which mechanisms describe autistic functioning, which phenomena belong to other conditions, which difficulties are produced in interaction, and which harms could be prevented through better understanding and better accessibility?

The position defended within this framework can be stated as follows:

Autistic people do not suffer from autism. Autistic people suffer from the consequences of autism not being correctly taken into account throughout the social system, and these consequences are socio-generated, sensory, mental, or other harms which, ultimately, are violations of natural harmony.

This formulation is a proposal specific to Autistan and Autismology. It does not remove the need to identify diseases, disorders, pain, or real difficulties when they exist. It asks precisely that these not be automatically confused with autistic nature itself.