Alison Gopnik: belief

Transcript context

…There’re some papers in experimental economics. They indicate that autistic people — they’re more likely to be Bayesian, and they’re more likely to do better at game theoretic exercises than non-autistic humans. Should we infer from that that autistics have theory of mind? Well, this is another example of something where there’s a simple, intuitive account. People have autism or people don’t have autism. Again, I think the reality beyond just thinking about the spectrum is that there’s a whole incredibly wide range of ways of interacting with the world, some of which you think of as being in the normal variation, some of which cause trouble for the people who have them, to the point of kids who can’t speak, never learn how to use language, need to be taken care of all the time. It’s not at all clear that there’s any single underlying fact about how that variation works. There’s some evidence, even in people who wouldn’t be diagnosed with autism, that there’s this tension between being very socially involved and engaged and being good at this abstract pattern induction, but I think it’s just too simple. Again, to use another analogy, it’s as if, in the 19th century, you said, “Do people with dropsy have some characteristic or not?” It turns out dropsy is not actually a thing. Dropsy is a symptom. I think the same thing is going to turn out to be true and has turned out to be true with autism. Diagnosis of autism doesn’t pick up or reflect anything?…

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