Ian Hacking - Ricerca sull'intelligenza artificiale specializzata al MIT

Ian Hacking

Humans, aliens & autism

Contraries illumine what they are not.

Aliens, typically from outer space, are
almost by de½nition not human. Cur-
rent portrayals of aliens may show more
about who we, the humans, are than
they do about our extragalactic contrar-
ies. In portrayal by opposites there is
often a large dose of fear: Per esempio,
that we may be all too like the aliens we
imagine. That leads to a paradox about
autism and aliens. A persistent trope in
some autism communities is that autis-
tic people are aliens, O, symmetrically,
that non-autistic people seem like aliens
to autists. Some autists are attracted to
the metaphor of the alien to describe
their own condition, or to say that they
½nd other people alien. Conversely, peo-
ple who are not autistic may in despera-
tion describe a severely autistic family
member as alien.

I wonder less what this phenome-
non shows about autism than what it
reveals about what it is to be human. It
is to be expected that what contraries
teach may not be something hidden,
but something that has always been on
the surface, almost too banal for us to
notice. The revelation of the obvious
is not to be despised, for often the ob-
vious is blinding.

Oliver Sacks used a remark by Temple

Grandin as the title of an essay about
autism, which became the title of his
book An Anthropologist on Mars. Grandin,
an extraordinarily able autist, had said
to Sacks, “Much of the time I feel like
an anthropologist on Mars.”1 She felt
that interactions with other people were
often as dif½cult as interviewing Mar-
tians. We move on from Mars to the ex-
tragalactic planet Aspergia, whose den-
izens have, unfortunately, been exiled
to Earth. They ½nd that the inhabitants
of Earth are aliens with whom they are
forced to share a planet, while earthlings
in turn regard them as an alien species.
A nasty variant was used in a disturb-
ing autism awareness sound bite given
wide distribution a couple of years ago
by the advocacy organization can: Cure
Autism Now. After a bit of ominous mu-
sic, an intensely concerned young father
intones, “Imagine that aliens were steal-
ing one in every two hundred children.
. . . That is what is happening in America
today. It is called autism.” This is the an-
cient myth of the changeling, the troll
child substituted in the dead of night for
an infant sleeping in his cot at home.
I spoke of some autism communities
toying with the metaphor of aliens. Au-
tism is a highly contested ½eld, and there
are many collectives with quite distinct

Dædalus Summer 2009

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agendas. I have to make clear from the
start that, far from regarding people
with autism as aliens, I believe it to be
a very substantial human achievement
that room is being created for autistic
people to live more comfortably among
those who are not autistic. More and
more resources are available to serve
such ends, and the social history of this
ongoing progress is a promising tale of
hard work, a ray of light.

This essay uses autism as a foil. Che cosa
is it about autistic people that prompts
the trope of the alien? How are autists
different from other human beings, In
such a way that a gifted autist can feel
that living among humans is like living
with Martians? How can a gross but ef-
fective sound bite create the sense that
aliens are snatching our children to
make them theirs? I am of the school
that thinks you can learn about X by
reflecting on what makes something
not-X. What does the metaphor of the
alien, insofar as it’s connected to au-
tism, show about humanity?

Alien invasion is the lowest form

of intergalactic ½ction, but the word
alien dates back to earliest English, E
has always had an association with oth-
erness or foreignness. In America, IL
term “resident alien” is used for non-
citizens allowed to live and work in the
United States–a term so demeaning
Quello, colloquially, Americans tend to re-
fer to immigrants as having a green card,
rather than as being resident aliens. Al-
though “resident alien” isn’t incorrect
in its denotation, I shall use alien with
its recent connotations, which seem to
have entered common usage in post–
World War II science ½ction. Aliens
come from outer space–or, almeno
from somewhere other than Earth.
Humans and the “other-worldly”
have been available as a duet for a very

long time.2 Seventeenth-century Europe
is especially rich in extraterrestrial uto-
pias, satires, scienti½c speculation, E
moral reflection. Their inhabitants, be
they evil or models of virtue, served as
foils for human beings. In that respect
they are like the extragalactic creatures
of our day. They also served as a screen
question–a question that, like Freud’s
screen memories, hides what is really
being asked, namely, whether the indige-
nous people of the Americas had souls.3
Aliens in modern space adventures
may talk and walk like us, but by de½ni-
tion they are not human. Hence human
and alien are a tightly bonded pair. Aliens
can be better than us, as in moral fables
such as et. Most of the time they seem
to be bent on destroying us. Monsters
are terrifying, but when push comes to
shove, they are closer to humans than
aliens. At least they are on our side in
Monsters vs. Aliens. In that recent movie,
DreamWorks studios’ ½rst animated 3D
release, a bride is hit by a meteor on her
wedding day, E, like Alice, grows to
½fty feet tall, less an inch. The U.S. Air
Force kidnaps her to a secret concentra-
tion camp for monsters, populated by
Dr. Cockroach, Ph.D. (humanoid body,
cockroach head), a 350-foot-long grub,
and their ilk. Earth is invaded by an
alien robot that sets about destroying
the United States, and the president re-
sponds by enlisting the monsters, who
save America. Message: prefer terrestri-
al monsters to extragalactic aliens. UN
metaphor for an immigration policy?

Friend or foe, aliens are de½nitely not
us. Tuttavia, we seem to hold up aliens
as mirrors to teach what is best or worst
in us or in the human condition. Let us
now move past this doublet to a trian-
gle in which autism occupies the third
point, and where the very word alien is
a second-order metaphor. At zero order,
an alien is a foreigner. At ½rst order, an

Humans,
aliens &
autism

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Dædalus Summer 2009

Ian
Hacking
on being
human

alien is a rational and sentient being
from outer space. At second order,
the word is used as a metaphor for
the strangeness of autistic people.

Hardly anyone had heard of autism

before Rain Man in 1988, some twenty
years ago. There is an astounding story
behind the word autism–from its intro-
duction around 1910 as the name of
self-absorbed schizophrenic behavior,
through the name of a diagnosis for
children in 1943, and up to its radical
expansion in recent years–yet until
fairly recently, the word was unfamiliar.
Today every reader knows about autism,
if only because it is blazoned on every-
thing from billboards to bus stop shel-
ters. Many know someone diagnosed
on the autistic spectrum, which includes
Asperger’s syndrome. Since everyone
has some common knowledge about
the condition, my ½rst task is to record
ten reservations, quali½cations, E
cautions, in order to guard against this
or that misapprehension.

First and foremost, all of those chil-
dren and adults with autism are very dif-
ferent from each other. There are books
titled or subtitled “The Autistic Child,"
but there is no such entity, the autistic
child, as if it were a subspecies of hu-
man beings. One current slogan, “If you
know about one autistic person, you
know about one autistic person,” cannot
be emphasized too much. In what fol-
lows I shall pay special attention to one
trait of autism in its more severe forms,
but I do not mean to imply that anyone
diagnosed with autism exempli½es this
trait to a strong degree. I use an abstrac-
tion based on a stereotype of this trait
to think about all humanity; it does not
reflect in any way on the details of a life
lived by any individual. I am using au-
tism as a vehicle, and am not discus-
sing the condition in its own right.

Dædalus Summer 2009

Secondo, the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders (dsm) clas-
si½es autism as a mental disorder, a per-
vasive developmental disorder, Infatti.
But it is not a kind of madness, or a men-
tal disorder like bipolar disorder. Nel
highly contested world of autism, some
argue that it is not a disorder at all, only
a difference from other people. Hence,
like black pride or gay pride, there is
something akin to autism pride, Quale
at present may be settling into a “neu-
rodiversity movement.”

Members of this loosely de½ned fac-
tion agree that autism is a neurological
condition, but so, after all, is the state
of what they call neurotypicals. Most peo-
ple who will read this essay are, nonostante
our oddities, neurotypicals. It is also
true that many people who will read it
can, like its author, notice autistic traits
in themselves. For millennia we neuro-
typicals have refused to acknowledge
neurodiversity and so (it is said) do not
understand even ourselves.

People with autism are part of this di-
versity, celebrated in an era and a culture
such as ours, where difference is under-
stood as a good thing. The movement is
a fascinating development in the odyssey
of autism. But beware: I have noticed
that when I say “neurotypical” in mixed
or neurotypical company, many neuro-
typicals say “neuro-normal” back to me.
That’s exactly to miss the point. The neu-
rodiversity movement rejects the idea
that there is neuro-normality.

Third quali½cation: autism is ½led
as a pervasive developmental disorder,
one that can be noticed very early in life.
What we now call autism began as infan-
tile autism, but never forget that autism
is for life. There is neither a known cause
nor a known cure. Matters stand differ-
ently, Tuttavia, from the ways they stood
a few decades ago. We now know how to
work with very young autistic children,

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in order to help them compensate for
their differences and adapt to the world
of neurotypicals. Many labor-intensive
programs are available, although autistic
communities say there are not yet nearly
Abbastanza.

We are also doing a fair job of helping
neurotypicals to be less uncomfortable
in the company of autistic people. Questo
is not a ground for complacency, ma il
lives of many families with one or more
severely autistic children are a great deal
better than they could have been even
twenty years ago.

A fourth reservation is that there
are a great many approaches to autism,
none of which is de½nitive. There are
also many advocacy groups with differ-
ent targets, which is why I spoke of au-
tistic communities in the plural. Some
of the differences arise from the nature
of the autistic individuals involved; oth-
ers arise from very different conceptions
of autism and even of disability. Some
autistic communities reject the very
idea of a cure, which Cure Autism Now
(can) espouses. Another organization,
Defeat Autism Now! (dan!) emphasizes
diet and supplements, among other
things. The Autism National Committee
(autcom) urges that autistic people are
the real experts on autism. At present it
argues for the importance of facilitated
communication, a technique that oth-
ers hold to be a sham.

Fifth, it is now standard to speak of

the autistic spectrum and of autistic
spectrum disorders, “asds.” A spec-
trum is intended to emphasize the previ-
ous point about variety, but the image is
problematic: spectra are linear and au-
tism isn’t. The metaphor suggests that
you can arrange autistic people on a line,
from more to less. It does make sense to
speak of high-functioning people with
autism, but that covers an extraordinary
range of people. It also makes sense to

speak of being severely autistic–which,
if anything, covers an even wider range
of individuals. Spectrum is a metaphor
from optics; if we are to use a meta-
phor from the sciences, I would prefer
to speak of an autistic manifold. Ma
the terminology of spectra is too estab-
lished to root out.

Sixth, it is common to distinguish
three groups of dif½culties experienced
by autistic children, namely, social and
linguistic dif½culties and ½xedness;
these persist in various degrees through
life. This triad, as it is called, may be
more of a mnemonic than a de½nition,
although it is canonized in diagnostic
protocols. It focuses on three dif½cul-
ties deemed to be central, but there are
many other aspects of autism, some
more physical than mental.

Many people with autism have
(UN) various kinds of disadvantage in
social interactions with neurotypicals.
Most important for the purposes of
this essay are their problems under-
standing what other people are doing,
thinking, and feeling. Many cannot
read your state of mind from your body
language in the way that most children
can. I do not refer here to the theory
that autists lack a “Theory of Mind”;
I mean something prior to theory, non
something theoretical about a theory
and its absence in autists. I try to stay
closer to phenomena, best put by say-
ing that many autistic people do not
immediately know what another per-
son is doing and have to work it out
from clues. This is one part, but an es-
sential one, of a larger canvas of dif½-
culties in human relationships, includ-
ing those within the family. This aspect
of autism–which, to repeat, shows up
in innumerable ways and in many de-
grees–is my focus below. Not surpris-
ingly, we shall ½nd that it is a primary
ground for the metaphor of aliens.

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Dædalus Summer 2009

Ian
Hacking
on being
human

Inoltre, many autistic children
Avere (B) dif½culties acquiring spoken
lingua, to the point that some are
mute for life, and many (C) are upset
by change. They take what is said liter-
alleato. They do not understand pretending,
and they do not play, even alone, in the
ways in which most children do. I call
this ½xedness, but many other terms
are in use. A diagnosis on the autistic
spectrum demands that at least two of
these three de½cits, or differences, are
apparent.

Many autistic children ½nd their dif-

ferences from most people to be both
deeply frustrating and frightening. IL
communal and family worlds in which
they are expected to live are hospitable
to most neurotypical children, but are
constantly threatening for many autis-
tic ones. Some of them succumb to vio-
lent temper tantrums. Others just want
to get away to a safe place, curling up,
Per esempio, in a closet or on a stairwell.
Seventh, there are many aspects of au-

tism beyond the triad. Many autistic
children are subject to seizures. Many
are hypersensitive to loud sounds, bright
colors, and itchy surfaces, even the tex-
ture of a drink. A quite different group
of problems, sometimes gathered un-
der the label dyspraxia, is quite com-
mon. It primarily involves motor skills:
bad balance, a tendency to bump into
things, poor hand-eye coordination,
dif½culties in initiating or stopping
movements, and even a poor hand-
grasp, which makes it hard to use a key
or a pencil. Many dyspraxic children
begin to crawl, stand, and jump much
later than their peers. Così, although
autism is usually thought of as a clus-
ter of mental and emotional disabili-
ties, there may also be many physical
disabilities–or, to speak with the neu-
rodiversity movement, many physical
differences.

An eighth observation is that no one
knows whether these several problems
arise from a single neurological anomaly,
or have distinct causes. Likewise, no one
knows what is going to help. Even when
we have two autistic brothers, and hence
a presumed shared genetic basis for their
autism, a regime that helps one may be
useless to his brother. Per esempio, In
Charlotte Moore’s biography of her two
autistic sons, George and Sam, one boy
is much helped by a gluten-and-casein-
free diet, but it is useless for his broth-
er.4 Yet the brother is much helped by a
program intended to help autistic chil-
dren “integrate” sensory experiences
that overpower them; this does not help
the ½rst boy at all. (Moore is one parent
who emphasizes the physical aspects of
autism that are so often underplayed in
textbooks and manuals.)

A ninth reservation, of a different
type, is that I shall use the word autism
to talk about anything said to be on the
autistic spectrum. Take Asperger’s syn-
drome, introduced about 1980 by Lorna
Wing, a British psychiatrist, in the name
of a Viennese doctor who long before
had diagnosed a small group of children
with autistic dif½culties but who did
not have notable problems acquiring
lingua. The name Asperger’s is now
often used synonymously with “high-
functioning,” but there are also debates
as to whether it is something different
altogether.

Lorna Wing, who also characterized
the triad of dif½culties mentioned above,
is no longer content with the classi½-
cation she created. It is said that some
members of the developmental disor-
ders task force for the future dsm-v
want to eliminate Asperger’s as a diag-
nosis. I take no position, except that
despite the current popularity of the
label “Asperger’s,” I shall avoid it. IO
use autism for the entire manifold of

Dædalus Summer 2009

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associated dif½culties. This does not im-
ply any criticism of the very large num-
ber of people who cheerfully call them-
selves Aspies. Likewise, I shall not say
“on the autistic spectrum.” Once we
have agreed that autism is polymorphic
in its manifestations, it is better to speak
simply of autism.

A tenth remark concerns some all-too-

frequently-asked questions. I shall an-
swer two of them without argument, non
to take a stand, but to evade the ques-
tions while showing where I do stand.
One question is about incidence: are
there really more autistic children born
every year than ever before in history?
Are the amazing increases in reported
prevalence due to an epidemic of au-
tism? My answer is no. The increases are
thanks to expanding criteria of diagno-
sis, much greater alertness on the part of
primary-care physicians and teachers to
the possibility of autism, and to the fact
that a diagnosis of autism gets a troubled
child much better care for special needs
than any other diagnosis. Thus a decent
gp with the option of diagnosing autism
will almost always do so, because it is
good for the child and the family.

A second question is about the mercu-
ry in the old-fashioned mmr, which in-
cludes the measles vaccine. Does it pre-
dispose toward, or cause, autism? No.5
But let me add a caveat. A child’s brain,
from conception to the age of two years,
grows at a prodigious rate. It is an unbe-
lievably sensitive instrument, putting
itself together over the course of thirty-
three months. We should be very wary
of subclinical toxic substances in the en-
vironment. My two youngest grandchil-
dren are under two. When their respec-
tive mothers were pregnant, I strongly
urged both mothers to go organic, E
to avoid the armory of toxic cleansers
found in most modern homes. I take
toxicity very seriously indeed. I also

take rubella very seriously, and consid-
er it horrible that parents, relying on
ill-founded rumors about vaccines no
longer in use, have stopped vaccinating
their children.

Autism picked up the trope of the

alien about twenty years ago. It has
been flourishing in some autistic quar-
ters, and is reviled in others. For starters,
there are books with titles like Through
the Eyes of Aliens, whose author is herself
autistic,6 O, Women from Another Planet?
whose author is afflicted by, among oth-
er things, Asperger’s syndrome and has
organized a women’s collective to tell
stories of their lives with Asperger’s.7
A chapter in the latter book is called
“How I came to understand the neuro-
typical world.”8 You can hear two types
of voice behind the titles of these books:
yes, we are aliens, and it is great to be
different, quirks and all; NO, we are not
aliens, we are women here on Earth,
out to reorganize social norms.

There is also a new genre of ½ction,
featuring novels in which an autistic
character plays an essential part in
the plot. A signi½cant proportion of
these works are written by parents or
relatives of autistic children, including
Marti Leimbach’s Daniel Isn’t Talking,
a book that resonates with many par-
ents of autists. In that novel, we are set
up from the start: shopping with her
mother, the twenty-two-year-old future
mother of Daniel says, “I could only
give birth to an alien.” Her mother re-
plies, “You will have the most beautiful
babies.” Later on in the book, after her
son is diagnosed with autism, Daniel’s
mother feels “as though I started the
journey this morning with my beloved
little boy and am returning with a slight-
ly alien, uneducable time bomb.”9

Another novel, Cammie McGovern’s
thriller Eye Contact, features a ten-year-

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Dædalus Summer 2009

Ian
Hacking
on being
human

old severely autistic boy who (perhaps)
witnesses the murder of a slightly older
girl. A special-needs aide says, “I used
to think: Here are a bunch of kids so
brilliant, so truly ahead of us intellectu-
alleato, they came out of the womb, took
one look around this screwed-up world
and said to themselves, Good-bye. I’ll
go on living, but not here. Not on this
planet.”10

The trope is found in science ½ction,
as well as in tales for children. Of Mice
and Aliens combines both genres. Zeke,
an alien, crash-lands in the backyard
of Ben, a boy who has recently been
declared to have Asperger’s syndrome.
Together they set out to explore Ben’s
suburban Australian world and its in-
abitanti. “With Ben learning to cope
with his newly diagnosed Asperger’s
syndrome, and Zeke trying to cope with
life on Earth, things are not always as
they seem.”11 Here it is not autists as
aliens, but aliens and autists in cahoots.
All permutations seem to be played
fuori. Pamela Victor’s character Baj, SU
the planet Aulnar, has not only a flying
bicycle, but a magical communication
kit (the Word Launcher) and an invis-
ible Calming Cape. There is also the
equivalent of a magical ear trumpet,
which enables Baj to spot the point
of what someone is saying to him.12

Back in the real world, contrast such
enthusiasm for aliens with Tito Rajar-
shi Mukhopadhyay’s reaction to Por-
tia Iversen’s Strange Son.13 Mukhopad-
hyay, seriously handicapped except
when he is at a computer keyboard,
is a gifted autistic author. Strange Son is
about Iversen’s own son, and his and
her encounters with Mukhopadhyay and
his mother. Iversen is a founder of Cure
Autism Now, whose alien abduction
ad was mentioned earlier. She brought
both mother and son from India to
America so she could disseminate the

mother’s amazing teaching practices.
In a review of Iversen’s book on Ama-
zon’s U.S. site, Mukhopadhyay writes:
“The book Strange Son felt like a ‘slap’ on
my face. . . . My actions have been men-
tioned as ‘beastly,’ ‘alien being,’ ‘pos-
sessed by a demon.’” He hates many of
Iversen’s statements, ad esempio, “When I
left their apartment that day I felt as if
I’d glimpsed into the mind of an alien
being.”14 Some people ½nd the trope
of the alien a powerful way to state the
obvious, while others ½nd it odious.

In 2005, Bob and Suzanne Wright

founded Autism Speaks. It has become
the engine of charities for autism re-
search in the United States, and it is now
assuming that role in the United King-
dom. Mr. Wright is ceo of nbc Univer-
sal, and a powerhouse in the corporate
mondo. Why did he and his wife found
Autism Speaks? He is often quoted as
saying, “I want my grandson back!” The
metaphor of abduction feels overpower-
ing to some families; a baby that was a
lovely human being has disappeared.
Jim Sinclair, in a talk titled “Don’t
Mourn for Us,”15 countered this atti-
tude. He urged parents not to go around
pining for a child they wanted but nev-
er had. To Sinclair, there never was the
grandson that the Wrights thought they
had. If they need to mourn, they should
go to a grief counselor who helps par-
ents of children who died in infancy.
Sinclair was speaking for yet an-
other advocacy organization, grasp:
The Global and Regional Asperger Syn-
drome Partnership. For the autistic
child, he said, it is the parents and the
neurotypicals who are alien:

Each of us [autistic people] who does
learn to talk to you, each of us who
manages to function at all in your so-
ciety, each of us who manages to reach

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out and make a connection with you, È
operating in alien territory, making con-
tact with alien beings. We spend our en-
tire lives doing this. And then you tell us
that we can’t relate.

The trope of the alien, Poi, is symmet-
ric: autistic people are aliens; or neuro-
typicals are aliens for autistic people.
I have already mentioned an entertain-
ing version that combines both angles,
namely Aspergia.16 “Each human cul-
ture has a mythology to account for its
existence and whence it came. Now we
have one too!” Aspergia is today’s At-
lantis, a planet from which the Asper-
gians came to Earth. (One blogger calls
Aspergia her utopia). Aspergians have
found that Earth is inhabited by some
alien form of life called humans.

Why does the metaphor of the alien crop
up so often in fact and ½ction? Let us take
Temple Grandin’s comment–“Much
of the time I feel like an anthropologist
on Mars”–seriously for a moment.
Wittgenstein thought, “If a lion could
talk, we could not understand him.”17
If a Martian spoke, would we under-
stand it? Only if we shared or came to
share some “forms of life,” some ways
of living together. That is precisely the
problem for a person with severe autism.
Autistic people have a great deal of dif½-
culty sharing any form of life with the
neurotypical community. But the evoca-
tive phrase, “form of life,” is never more
than a pointer; we need to be more spe-
ci½c about what’s missing.

“The eyes are the mirror of the soul,"

or window to the soul. At least since Ro-
man times, some version of this maxim
has been in circulation, evident in such
places as the Latin proverb, Oculus animi
index. The well-known literary ½gures
who use this saying play with it as a
standing reference point that everyone

already knows. Thus in the dialogue De
Oratore, Cicero has Crassus say, “the face
is an image of the soul, while the eyes re-
flect it.”18 Cicero is not idly repeating
some piece of general knowledge. His
protagonist is discussing the delivery of
a speech, and seems to be counseling the
orator to use his eyes as if he means what
he says: even if you do not feel such-and-
such an emotion, use your eyes to simu-
late the emotion. Here Cicero exploits
an already well-understood conceit.

It is much the same with St. Girolamo,
who of course knew his Cicero. Writing
to a widow, telling her how to preserve
her modesty and chastity, Jerome be-
gins a paragraph, “Avoid the company
of young men.” He goes on to warn,
“The face is the mirror of the mind and
a woman’s eyes without a word betray
the secrets of her heart.”19

Dante’s Convivio, composed after the
death of Beatrice as a poet’s version of
The Consolations of Philosophy, is a strange
lavoro, parts of which are written in the
form of poems followed by commentary
on the poems. The soul, writes Dante,
“reveals herself in the eyes so clearly that
the emotion present in her may be rec-
ognized by anyone who gazes at them
intently.”20 This is part of a commen-
tary on the lines:

In her countenance appear such things
As manifest a part of the joy of Paradise.
I mean in her eyes and in her sweet smile,
For here Love draws them, as to himself.

The “her” of the commentary is con-
strued as Dame Philosophy herself,
and the entire work is an incredibly
overworked conceit. My point is only
that Dante was playing with a saying he
could assume to be familiar to anyone.
To judge by printed dictionaries of
proverbs, the maxim appears as a prov-
erb in all modern European languages.
A list of English printed versions of the

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Dædalus Summer 2009

Ian
Hacking
on being
human

saying, from 1545 to the present decade,
is readily found in the Oxford Dictionary
of Proverbs, with the last entry taken
from a South Florida thriller: “All that
windows-of-the-soul bullshit.” The
speaker, usually dismissive of eyes as
windows, recants on looking at an old
school photo of the villain. He had been
viewing the fbi’s state-of-the-art digital
processing of photos on a screen. “It was
excellent work, but like every computer
enhancement he’d seen, something
was lost from the original photograph.
Some spark in the eyes.” In the small
class photo there is “a brooding de½-
ance,” such as one might see in torture
victims whose whole sense of fear has
mutated, but “also a glint of bitter hu-
mor. This was some smug little alien
bastard.”21 Not from outer space, Hal
is just a very nasty piece of work, UN
“psychopath” employed as an assas-
sin by a drug cartel.

The faded photograph, with those

occhi, is something of a window on
Hal’s soul. “On the television screen,
Tuttavia, his eyes were flat and empty.
Drained of any hint of humanity by
the digital rendering.” This is a shrewd
observation. The farther you are from
the material body, the less you can see
in the eyes. Notice that the hero saw a
brooding de½ance; he inferred from such
cues that this was some smug bastard.

The eyes, as mirror of the soul, O

as window on the soul, have served
as a standard metaphor in the West for
millennia. Autism connects with this
metaphor by way of autists’ notorious
dif½culty with eye contact. For what-
ever reason, autistic people, when they
look at someone’s face at all, tend to
focus on the lower part of the face (IL
mouth and chin) and not the eyes. Questo
phenomenon has an immediate conse-
quence. For a person with autism, the eyes

of another are not a window to the soul of
that other person. Emotions, says Dante,
can be recognized in the eyes by anyone
“who gazes at them intently”; but that is
exactly what most seriously autistic peo-
ple cannot do: gaze at the eyes intently,
or perceive emotions therein.

Conversely, the eyes of the autist are
not a clear mirror of the soul within, COME
neurotypicals would expect. Many au-
tistic children seem positively cherubic
when they are at peace. (Yes, cherubs
are from another world.) Yet one can-
not see what is going on in their heads.
Some neurotypicals are frightened by
the blankness, for they feel that maybe
there is no soul there.

But there is the face, pure. Analogous
sayings, evidenced by Cicero himself,
refer to the face as mirror or image of
the soul. Dante’s stanza begins, “In her
countenance appear such things,” for it
was the eyes and the mouth that struck
the poet. That is precisely why smiley
faces and their variants are such good
icons. They are now used, in some teach-
ing regimens, to train autistic children
how to recognize the emotions of oth-
ers.

Cicero discussed the face and eyes
in the larger context of the body and
its gestures. So let us turn to the whole
body, its movements, and its stance. UN
point easily missed is that, whether it
is the eyes, the face, or the body, the tra-
dition that is packed into the proverbs
always conveys the idea of seeing direct-
ly, and not of inferring. There is no ap-
parent reasoning going on: one just
looks into, or through, the eyes to see
the soul. More generally, as Wittgen-
stein has it, “The human body is the
best picture of the human soul.”22
Wittgenstein was hardly being orig-

inal when he penned that aphorism,
speaking from a tradition at least as old

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as Cicero. His remark is one of many in
Part II of the Philosophical Investigations
that seem to encapsulate ideas found
in the middle part of Wolfgang Köh-
ler’s Gestalt Psychology, ½rst published
In 1929.23 (Wittgenstein devoted some
of his classes to the ½rst edition of that
book.) Köhler thinks many aspects of
the body provide “pictures” of the in-
ner thoughts and feelings. For Köhler,
it is not only stance, but also body-lan-
guage, as we now say: “[N]ot only the
so-called expressive movements but
also the practical behavior of human
beings is a good picture of their inner
life, in a great many cases.”24

Both men give numerous examples

of such phenomena of seeing in the
eyes and in the movements of the body,
as well as through agitation, what a per-
son feels, thinks, or intends; seeing that
a person is in a bad mood; noticing that
a child both wants to touch a dog and
is frightened of doing so. Köhler is now
mostly remembered for his work with
apes, and for his theory of visual orga-
nization, part of the Gestalt theory of
perception. But the middle of his book
is dense in close observations of ordi-
nary behavior, some of which were re-
cast into elegant phrases by Wittgen-
stein.25 Here is a more complex case:

If my attention is attracted by a strange
object, a snake for instance, I feel direct-
ed toward it and at the same time a feeling
of tension is experienced. A friend, even if
he has not recognized the snake, will see
me and especially my face and eyes direct-
ed toward it; in the tension of my face he
will have a visual picture of my inner ten-
sion, as in its direction he has a direct pic-
ture of the direction which I experience.26

Some readers will see in this vignette the
friend inferring from Köhler’s behavior
that he is unnerved, and inferring where
to look for the source of Köhler’s feeling.

IO, Anche se, believe Köhler is absolutely
correct in describing the phenomena;
there is nothing worth the name of in-
ference here. The friend just sees; he
has a “direct picture.” Of course, In
every one of Köhler’s examples there
will be cases which call for inference.
The point is not that one never infers,
but that often one just “sees.” A neu-
rocognitivist may insist that there must
always be a “computation” that passes
from the sensory input to an under-
standing of the mental state of another
persona. Köhler would say that, if so,
it must be different in kind from the
“computation” involved in inference.
Köhler knew he was only describing,
and he hoped that later generations of
workers would be able to explain and
understand the phenomenon. He wrote
that his account “gives us neither an
altogether new nor an altogether per-
fect key to another person’s inner life;
it tries only to describe so far as it can
that kind of understanding which is the
common property and practice of mankind.”
He hoped for future work “when the
simpler facts described in this chapter
will have found more general acknowl-
edgement.”27

I do not think we have fully come to
terms with the “simpler facts” Köhler
presents. They certainly bear on autism,
for that kind of immediate understand-
ing that Köhler described is not the com-
mon property and practice of that part of hu-
mankind that is autistic.

We should pay attention to Köhler’s

and Wittgenstein’s contrast between, SU
the one hand, what one sees in the eyes,
face, body, and the movements and ges-
tures of another, E, on the other hand,
what is inferred. The existence of such
immediate understanding does not im-
ply that what one sees is merely the exer-
cise of an innate faculty, for it is to some

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Dædalus Summer 2009

Ian
Hacking
on being
human

extent learned or acquired in the com-
munity of others. Per esempio, one does
not so readily see what foreigners are
doing, let alone see into their souls, COME
is the case with one’s compatriots.

Köhler’s phenomena should make
us rethink an idea widely shared by ana-
lytical philosophers: the idea that one
knows the mind of another–or indeed
that others have minds at all–“by anal-
ogy with one’s own case.” We would be
better to heed Lev Vygostky’s proposals,
that concepts of the mental life come
later than an understanding of commu-
nal life, and are “internalized” not as
an entry ticket to society, but only in the
course of growing up and living among
groups of people, starting with the ex-
tended family.

Underlying the “Other Minds” pic-
ture is a fundamental misconception,
namely that I get the idea of mind and
soul from knowledge of my own mind.
The reasoning seems straightforward.
I know what I think and feel and hope
for; I know whom I love and whom
I despise; I know my left foot is sore.
How do I know? By looking inside my-
self, how else?

That picture prompts what is called
the Problem of Other Minds. It is not
a universal or timeless problem of phi-
losophy. It was brought to the fore only
in the early twentieth century by men
such as William James and Bertrand
Russell.28 How do I know what you are
thinking since I cannot look into your
mente? By analogy to my own case, an-
swered Russell and James. Later in the
century, analytic philosophers said that
it is not analogy, but explanation that is
used. I explain your behavior by postu-
lating that you have a mind like mine.
This is called “an inference to the best
explanation.”

The next step in this sequence of ideas
is part of the overall repertoire of cogni-

tive theory. We do not infer other minds
by analogy; instead, we come equipped
with a Theory of Mind module, a facul-
ty for attributing mental states to other
people. This has become a canonical
part of psychology, much preferred to
models of analogy or inference. The idea
was inaugurated by David Premack and
Guy Woodruff studying chimpanzees.
Quickly it led in 1983 to the false-belief
tests devised by Heinz Wimmer and Jo-
sef Perner. Autistic children fare poorly
on these tests, which require thinking
about what other people believe, given
the evidence that they possess. Thanks
to Simon Baron-Cohen, Alan Leslie, E
Uta Frith, among others, the tests have
joined the arsenal for diagnosing autism.
Many people hardly waste the time to
write out “Theory of Mind” any more,
they just write “ToM.”29 I do not follow
this practice, because the very fact that
we use an abbreviation makes us take it
for granted, as some sort of proven fact.

One great virtue of the Theory of
Mind approach is that the ability to
know what other people feel and think
is no longer supposed to be a matter of
analogical inference, as the old Anglo
philosophers thought. Piuttosto, it is an
innate capacity, one that kicks in at an
early stage as the child matures, E
which may be associated with a Theory
of Mind mental module. As a corollary,
it does not kick in as early, or as well, for
most autistic children.

Further speculation is fuelled by the
idea of mirror neurons. Brain scans in-
dicate that when Jones sees that Smith
is sad or angry, blood flows to those
same neurons it flows to when Jones
himself is sad or angry. Generalmente, Quando
Jones observes Smith doing something,
or feeling an emotion, the very parts of
Jones’s brain that are activated when he
is so acting or feeling are activated by his
observing Smith. This phenomenon, Esso

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may be conjectured, underlies the phe-
nomena described by Köhler and apho-
rized by Wittgenstein.

Hence there is promising research that

suggests that the mirror neurons of au-
tistic people are not in working order;
either they are absent, or they function
differently. I emphasize that these fasci-
nating investigations are still open, how-
ever. A cynic may propose that the story
is being told backward: Jones’s relevant
neurons are active on seeing Smith sad
simply because he sees Smith sad–not,
he sees Smith sad because his sadness
neurons have been triggered.

Having acknowledged some of the

truly exciting theories and conjectures
about the mind now in circulation, let us
return to the phenomena described by
Köhler. They are familiar to most people,
but are precisely what are not familiar,
automatic, immediate, or instinctive for
most autistic people. As we have said,
they are not “the common property and
practice” of that part of mankind that is
autistic. Expert observers report that au-
tistic children do not see that someone
is in a bad humor; they do not follow
the direction of a startled person’s gaze;
they do not readily understand what an-
other person is doing–that is, they do
not easily recognize intentions.

Conversely, ordinary people cannot
see what an autistic boy is doing when,
to take a banal example, he is furious-
ly flapping his hands. What on earth is
hand-flapping? The parent or other out-
sider knows vaguely that there must be
some kind of agitation, yet the child
seems so tranquil when hand-flapping.
Articulate autists tell us how calming it
È. So we are now able to infer a bit of
what’s going on; but instinctive neuro-
typical ways of interacting with other
people do not enable us to look and see
what the child is feeling.

More disturbing is an inability even
to see what autistic children are doing.
Their actions make little sense, their in-
tentions are opaque. With the severely
autistic, it may seem as if they do not
even have many intentions. Hence they
are taken to be emotionally “thin” chil-
dren, who grow up to be “thin” men
and women, lacking a “thick” emotion-
al life. Or so it has seemed to most peo-
ple, including many parents and many
clinicians.

At best, the feelings and emotions of
the severely autistic must be inferred.
We are not even con½dent of our infer-
enze, not because we lack enough evi-
dence, but because we may doubt that
the concepts that have evolved over mil-
lennia for the description of neurotypi-
cals are apt for the autistic life. Here it is
necessary to repeat my ½rst caution. I am
using an abstraction from one of many
autistic traits in order to think about the
human condition, and am not speaking
directly to questions about the nature of
autism or the experience of autistic indi-
viduals.

Language matters. I would guess that

as long as there has been human com-
munication, there have been ways to
describe emotions and intentions. Per-
haps that is a mistake. Perhaps there is
a long prehistory of human self-realiza-
zione. Questo è, the Vygotskyan project of
crafting a language for the emotions of
others and ourselves may have taken
many, many generations of our remote
ancestors to complete. And only late in
prehistory, on this scenario, would this
language have been internalized. Che cosa
is now called ½rst-person authority over
awareness of our own emotional states
would, Poi, have come into being slow-
ly. If so, individuals with autism would
not have stood out in the same way that
they do now. (I am here speaking of pre-
history, not of the quite different fact

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Ian
Hacking
on being
human

that compulsory universal elementary
education was a prerequisite for noticing
various kinds of cognitive dif½culty in a
systematic way.)

Whatever evolutionary psychohisto-
ry we choose to imagine, it is a fact that
there has been a language for the inten-
zioni, desires, and emotions of other
people for all of historical time. It was,
Tuttavia, crafted by and for neurotypi-
cals. We are only just beginning to adapt
that language to the autistic life. In this
we are much helped by autobiographies,
novels, and the immensely rich world
of autism lived on the Internet. It is very
common to say that autobiographies de-
scribe autism “from the inside.”30 I sug-
gest there is little ready-made language
to describe this inside, and that the auto-
biographies and the blogs are creating it
right now.

We asked, “Why does the metaphor

of the alien crop up so often in fact and
½ction?” We can now state an answer:
because of the absence of Köhler’s phe-
nomena in relations between neurotypi-
cals and autistic people. These phenom-
ena are the “bedrock” for a “shared form
of life,” to use two of Wittgenstein’s
compelling phrases. Not only does Tem-
ple Grandin feel like an anthropologist
on Mars, but neurotypicals feel they
are confronted by unintelligible Mar-
tians when they ½rst confront the real-
ity of autism. It is important that she
says Mars, and not Papua New Guinea.
Innumerable languages are spoken in
that part of the world, and the customs
½rst encountered by Europeans are pass-
ing strange. But in no time at all, visitors
and inhabitants were talking, generat-
ing creoles, taking advantage of each
other. They did not share a common
civilization, but they shared something
far more fundamental, captured by
Wittgenstein’s metaphor of bedrock.

Neurotypicals and severely autistic

people do not initially share a form
of life because the bedrock is lacking,
and so an arti½cial platform must be
constructed. That is one way to de-
scribe what is going on right now. In
retrospect, we shall almost certainly
see today’s Internet as making possi-
ble a form of life in which autistic peo-
ple can thrive. It is precisely the medi-
um for human communication that
does not depend on body language or
eye contact–in short, it does not need
Köhler’s phenomena.

What distinguishes us from aliens (COME
we depict our contraries) is notoriously
not rationality, but our emotional lives.
We are fellow humans in that we grasp
each other’s intentions, feelings, wants.
Köhler’s phenomena enable such under-
standing to be taken for granted in our
common ways of life. They are the bedrock
of our humanity.

This conclusion is “obvious”; yet be-

cause the phenomena are so familiar,
it takes an acute observer of human
and animal behavior to point it out to
us. It takes a great philosopher to see
what the observer has noticed, and to
cast that into an aphorism. The insights
of Köhler and Wittgenstein have been
virtually forgotten, even when the lat-
ter’s aphorisms are cited in thought-
less awe. An inquiry into the trope of
autists and aliens may have been useful
not only to notice something about au-
tism, but also to remind us of a funda-
mental fact about human beings.

Köhler made an interesting observa-
tion on the score of what is obvious. “It
is not our fault that, to a deplorable de-
gree, the obvious has disappeared from
learned psychology, so that we have to
rediscover it.”31 There is a great af½ni-
ty between Wittgenstein and Köhler on
this attitude to what we do not notice,
both because it is always before our eyes,

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Humans,
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and also because we theorize instead of
looking.

It is well to conclude with a quite gen-

erous remark about human nature. Noi
tend to be exclusive. Anthropology and
sociology teach that human groups hang
together partly because of who they in-
clude and partly because of who they ex-
clude. Our instinct has always been to
exclude aliens, ½rst the terrestrial ones
and then the extraterrestrial. There are
a few fans of the seti project, the Search
for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, who
see themselves as welcoming intelligent
beings from outer space. But in general,
the rule is “keep the others out.”

Neurotypical society has certainly
excluded severely autistic people, con-
signing them, at best, to the role of vil-
lage idiots or feral children, E, at
worst, consigning them to institutions
Quello, in retrospect, seem absolutely hor-
ri½c. Whether or not the metaphor has
been used, the practice has been to ex-
clude the severely autistic as if they
were aliens. But now there are remark-
able endeavors afoot that aim at inte-
grating autistic individuals into a larg-
er social world.

Precisely because autistic children do

not share in Köhler’s phenomena, it is

now common practice to try to teach
them how to infer the feelings and in-
tentions of other children and adults
from behavior, gestures, and tone of
voice. There are even posters showing
what many people look like when they
are happy or sad. These may include
devices as simple as smiley faces and
their kin. There are far more elaborate
programs to teach how to tell, for ex-
ample, when the person you are talk-
ing to is getting bored, so that you will
not go on enthusing about the topic
on which your passions are ½xed, be
it brontosauruses or electric coffee-
makers.

There is immense controversy about
what helps what person. Sometimes bit-
ter words are exchanged as one school
of thought and action confronts another.
Desperate parents of the severely autis-
tic try everything. It is becoming pretty
clear that no speci½c agenda is good for
every autistic person. But there is good
reason to hope that, as I said at the start,
the social history of this ongoing prog-
ress is a promising tale of hard work. It
is a ray of light in the rather gloomy his-
tory of humans of the past few decades.

ENDNOTES
1 Oliver Sacks, “An Anthropologist on Mars,” The New Yorker, Dicembre 27, 1993; reprinted
in Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales (New York: Knopf, 1995), 295.
2 Starting, perhaps, with Lucian of Samosata (ca. 125–ca. 182), A True Story, trans. UN. M.
Harmon, Loeb Classical Library 14 (Cambridge, Massa.: Stampa dell'Università di Harvard, 1968),
247–357.
3 A short but wise passage in Leibniz captures many of the uses of aliens; New Essays Con-
cerning the Human Understanding, trans. Jonathan Bennett and Peter Remnant (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981), III, vi, section 22, as well as the notes. (This is mostly
omitted from the abridged edition of 1982.)
4 Charlotte Moore, George and Sam: Two Boys, One Family, and Autism (London: Viking,
2004).

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Ian
Hacking
on being
human

5 Leave aside the statistical analyses of the Centers for Disease Control and other authorities
(Quale, as it turns out, detect no effect) to consider that Japan cut mercury out of vaccines
at the ½rst whiff of trouble, and the rapid increase in autism diagnoses continued much as
in the United States and the United Kingdom.
6 Jasmine Lee O’Neill, Through the Eyes of Aliens: A Book about Autistic People (London: Jessica
Kingsley Publishers, 1998).
7 Jean Kearns Miller, Women from Another Planet? Our Lives in the Universe of Autism (1st
Books Library, 2003). Miller says she has been diagnosed with attention de½cit disorder
with Asperger’s syndrome traits, as well as major depression.
8 Ibid., 141.
9 Marti Leimbach, Daniel Isn’t Talking (London: Fourth Estate, 2006), 4, 91.
10 Cammie McGovern, Eye Contact (New York: Viking, 2006), 60.
11 The quotation is from the back cover blurb. Kathy Hoopmann, Of Mice and Aliens (Lon-

don: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2001). This book is a sequel in the Asperger Adventures
series to Hoopmann’s Blue Bottle Mystery (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2001), In
which Ben ½rst ½nds out what ails him.

12 Pamela Victor, Baj and the Word Launcher: Space Age Asperger Adventures in Communication

(London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2006).

13 Portia Iversen, Strange Son: Two Mothers, Two Sons, and the Quest to Unlock the Hidden World

of Autism (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006).

14 Ibid., 129.
15 A talk given at the International Conference on Autism, Toronto, 1993, and published in

Our Voice, the newsletter of Autism Network International; available at http://www.grasp
.org/media/mourn.pdf. One self-described “deconstruction” of Sinclair’s may be found
on a website whose name repudiates the trope of the alien: Whose planet is it anyway? IL
site features a blog, “Don’t Mourn, Get Attitude” (agosto 9, 2006), whose title, the author
explains, “is intended to make one thing clear: We are not, and never were, extraterrestri-
als flying around in ufos, freakish mutants wandering the galaxy, or aliens lost in space,
and we have just as much right to be on Planet Earth as anyone else.” The blog refers to
the umbrella organization Autism Speaks as a “hate group”; http://autisticbfh.blogspot
.com/2006/08/dont-mourn-get-attitude.html.

16 I am quoting from http://www.aspergia.com/, accessible through 2006, but no longer

active.

17 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, rev. 3rd trans. (1953; Oxford: Blackwell,

2001), 190e.

18 Cicero, De Oratore, 3.221: “Ut imago est animi voltus sic indices oculi,” from Cicero on the Ideal
Orator, trans. James M. May and Jakob Wisse (New York and Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001), 294.

19 St. Girolamo, Letters, Letter 54, To Furia. I have used the old translation from The Principal

Works of St. Girolamo, trans. W. H. Fremantle (Oxford: Parker & Company, 1893). The Loeb
version, Select Letters of St. Girolamo, trans. F. UN. Wright (Cambridge, Massa.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1933), has the accurate translation, “The face is the mirror of the mind, and eyes
without speaking confess the secrets of the heart,” but the older version better conveys the
intent of the letter.

20 Dante, Convivio, Trattato III, chap. 8, between line markers 9 E 10: “Dimostrasi ne li occhi
tanto manifesta, che conoscer si può la sua presente passione, chi bene là mira,” from Dante’s Il
Convivio (The Banquet), trans. R. H. Lansing (New York: Garland, 1990), 111.

21 James W. Hall, Rough Draft (New York: Macmillan, 2001), 23. I do not know whether the

author intended it or not, but he gives Hal traits common among autistic people, including

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echolalia, the practice of repeating back what a speaker has just said. He cannot be said to
experience most human emotions, but he has learned to work out what other people are
feeling and how it will affect their behavior.
22 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 152e.
23 Wolfgang Köhler, Gestalt Psychology (New York: Horace Liveright, 1929).
24 Ibid., 250.
25 I provide exact citations in “Autistic Autobiography,” Philosophical Transactions of the Roy-
al Society B(Biological Sciences) 364 (1522) (2009): 1467–1473. I owe my ½rst reflections on
Köhler and Wittgenstein to Janette Dinishak, “Wittgenstein and Koehler on Seeing and
Seeing Aspects” (doctoral thesis, University of Toronto, 2008). She has helped me a good
deal with this and other writings on autism.

26 Köhler, Gestalt Psychology, 250–251.
27 Ibid., 266–267; emphasis added.
28 An early discussion of the Problem of Other Minds is in John Stuart Mill, An Exami-

nation of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy and of the Principal Philosophical Questions dis-
cussed in his Writings (London: Longman, Verde, Longman, Roberts & Verde, 1865),
Chapter XII. The Problem seems to be insular, peculiar to the English language. There
are major entries for Other Minds in standard English-language philosophical encyclo-
pedias (Edwards, Routledge, Stanford Online), but not in those of other languages. Noi
½nd, Per esempio, in French a “problème des autres esprits” only where the author refers
to Anglo writers. In their books Problems of Philosophy, which mark the onset of the idea
that philosophy consists of problems, such as the Problem of Other Minds, both James
and Russell present the problem, and the solution, by analogy.

29 David Premack and Guy Woodruff, “Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind?"
Behavioral and Brain Science 1 (1978): 515–526; Uta Frith and Francesca Happé, “Theory
of Mind and Self-Consciousness: What is it Like to be Autistic?” Mind & Language 14
(1999): 1–22.

30 See Hacking, “Autistic Autobiography” for examples of this practice.
31 Köhler, Gestalt Psychology, 350.

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