On the Ontological Status of Autism: the Double Empathy Problem
The paper that reversed the direction of a diagnostic claim, and the conceptual anchor for everything this corpus says about communication across neurotype. Autism had long been defined partly by an impairment of theory of mind, an inability to read others; Milton argues the difficulty is a disjuncture in reciprocity between two differently disposed social actors, so that non-autistic people are just as poor at reading autistic people as the reverse. The deficit is relational, sitting between parties rather than within one of them, and locating it in the autistic person is a matter of which party holds the power to define the interaction rather than a matter of evidence. Milton draws on interactionist sociology and phenomenology to argue that the dominant account mistakes unfamiliarity for incapacity, and that the burden of adaptation is therefore assigned to the party least able to bear it and least responsible for the gap. Two features give the paper unusual standing. It is written by an autistic academic, at a time when autistic scholarship was routinely treated as testimony rather than analysis, which makes it also a case about whose account counts as evidence. And it is a short conceptual piece with no data, which is worth stating plainly: the empirical support arrived later, most directly through Crompton and colleagues, and the concept's rapid uptake in practice ran ahead of that evidence for several years. Its relevance here is direct. Any advice that tells a minority to adapt its signalling to a majority norm, whether about eye contact, posture or expression, assigns the whole cost of a mutual endeavour to one side, and double empathy is the argument that establishes the endeavour is mutual.
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