User:Noor barany

Microsociology of Autism, describes an interactionist approach to autism first proposed by Alex

Durig in the 1993 article “The Microsociology of Autism.” The full scope of a microsociological approach to autism was presented in Durig’s first book, Autism and the Crisis of Meaning (1996). Durig’s approach is interactionist in that it begins with a list of the main topics of interactionist theory and research. Then it matches these topics of interactionist theory and research to C. S. Peirce’s (1940; 1960-66) three modes of logical inference.

Topics of Interactionism                                                        Modes of Inference

Defined situation        <     <     <-    What if we inductively assume these?

situated identities

Role-taking

interpretive procedures

Then, we assume these inductive

'''hypotheses are true,'''

5. The behavior itself        <     <     <-    '''and deduce the expected behavior?'''

And when confronted with a novel situation

requiring a new idea to solve the puzzle or conflict,

we create an abduction as a new plausible induction

or deduction, and test it?

requiring a new idea to solve the puzzle or conflict,

or deduction, and test it?

According to Durig (1993) “acts of inference link interpersonal meanings across time and space, and we can say that the act of inference is the fundamental quality of the subjective organization of trans-situational meaning. And there are three modes of inference as described in the literature of the philosophy of science dating back to Pierce: (1) deduction, (2) induction, and, (3) abduction” (p. 9).

Deduction is the cold, hard logic of mathematics and computers. The function of it is that it always works the same way, over and over and over again. The benefit of it is that it is easy for us to agree that it is calculating something that is true (Durig, 1993).

Induction is the logic of scientific research. If we run an experiment every day for a month, and feed one group of students fresh fruit and vegetables for lunch, and another group junk food and soda for lunch, then we will feel confident that differing behaviors after lunch across test groups may be attributed to the effects of junk food (Durig, 1993.)

Abduction was next coined by Peirce to describe the inherently logical process of asking the first research question or postulating the initial hypothesis for the experiment (Peirce, 1960-66). He said that was a creative yet inherently plausible thought, therefore it was eminently logical as well (Peirce,1940; Durig, 1993).

Autism

Imagine the social inferencing model of meaningful perception, and imagine that an average person might have equal amounts of inductive and deductive inferencing. The inductive inferencing is like social inferencing that is used to consider social hypotheses and infer what is going on in a social situation. The deductive inferencing is like computer thinking and it computes the appropriate behavior for each social situation.

Now imagine taking the inductive inferencing, the social thinking, and lowering it dramatically. A person with no virtual social thinking and only the deductive inferencing or computer thinking would have trouble inferring what is going on in social life. That person would only be able to deduce behaviors exclusive of the expected social behaviors of the situation. That person would tend to get stuck making the same deductive inferences in the same way every day, whether they made sense or not.

In other words, that person is likely to be labeled as autistic (Durig, 1993; 1996). That person might actually behave more like a computer or a robot than an average human being (Durig, 1996). He or she would behave without taking into account his or her social surroundings and be locked in the same behaviors over and over and over. That is the basis for a logic-based theory of autistic perception and it comes from Durig’s proposal for a microsociology of autism (1993; 1996).

That also allows us to imagine if it would be possible for a person to have deductive inferencing, computer thinking that is higher than his or her social thinking, but his or her social thinking was still high enough to pass as socially normal. That person might be noticeably autistic in many ways, but not enough to be diagnosed autistic. That person might be “slightly autistic” (Durig, 1996). This implies that there is actually a continuum of perception and all of us lie on that continuum of inductive and deductive perception (Durig, 1993). Durig called this “slight autism” because on the continuum or spectrum of perception it is really all shades of gray (Durig, 1996).

In 2011, it was announced that the next DSM, the DSM-5, would drop the old definition of autism. They would no longer say there was a box for classic autism, there was a different box for high-functioning autism, and then there was yet a different box for Asperger’s Syndrome, and you are either in one of those boxes or you are out. Now they would begin talking about the autistic spectrum because it is really all shades of gray.