Hacking Ian
Collège de France11, place Marcelin Berthelot, 75231 Paris Cedex 5, France.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2009 May 27;364(1522):1467-73. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2008.0329.
Autism narratives are not just stories or histories, describing a given reality. They are creating the language in which to describe the experience of autism, and hence helping to forge the concepts in which to think autism. This paper focuses on a series of autobiographies that began with Grandin's Emergence. These are often said to show us autism from the 'inside'. The paper proposes that instead they are developing ways to describe experience for which there is little pre-existing language. Wittgenstein has many well-known aphorisms about how we understand other people directly, without inference. They condense what he had found in Wolfgang Köhler's Gestalt Psychology. These phenomena of direct understanding what other people are doing are, Köhler wrote, 'the common property and practice of mankind'. They are not the common property and practice of people with autism. Ordinary language is rich in age-old ways to describe what others are thinking, feeling and so forth. Köhler's phenomena are the bedrock on which such language rests. There is no such discourse for autism, because Köhler's phenomena are absent. But a new discourse is being made up right now, i.e. ways of talking for which the autobiographies serve as working prototypes.
自闭症叙事不仅仅是描述特定现实的故事或历史。它们正在创造用以描述自闭症体验的语言，从而有助于塑造思考自闭症的概念。本文聚焦于一系列始于格兰丁的《浮现》的自传。人们常说这些自传从“内部”向我们展示自闭症。本文提出，相反，它们正在开发一些方法来描述那些几乎没有现成语言来表达的体验。维特根斯坦有许多关于我们如何直接理解他人而无需推理的著名格言。这些格言浓缩了他在沃尔夫冈·苛勒的格式塔心理学中所发现的内容。苛勒写道，这些直接理解他人行为的现象是“人类的共同属性和实践”。它们并非自闭症患者的共同属性和实践。日常语言中有丰富的、由来已久的方式来描述他人的想法、感受等等。苛勒的现象是这种语言赖以存在的基石。对于自闭症来说不存在这样的话语，因为苛勒的现象并不存在。但一种新的话语正在当下被构建起来，即那些以自传作为实践原型的言说方式。
