"The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point, either exactly or approximately, a message selected at another point."
― Claude Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Communication
“Rather than lacking a theory of mind, it is argued here that due to differences in the way autistic people process info, they are not socialised into the same shared ethno as neurotypical people, and thus breaches in understanding happen all the time, leaving both in a state of confusion. The difference is that the neurotypical person can repair the breach, by the reassuring belief that ~99 out of 100 people still think and act like they do, and remind themselves that they are the normal ones.”
― Damian Milton, A Mismatch of Salience
“It is only when I type something in your language that you refer to me as having communication.”
― Mel Baggs, In My Language
To meet the diagnostic criteria for ASD as outlined in the DSM-5, a person must display “persistent deficits in social communication and interaction” across three key areas: “social emotional reciprocity”, “nonverbal communication/body language” and “relationship maintenance”. A communication breakdown is understood to be a failure on the part of the autistic person to engage in the narrow and unidirectional set of expected behaviours and responses regarded by the neurotypical as normative, not the result of a mutual misunderstanding between multiple different but equally valid types of communication (or, to use Damian Milton’s words, A Mismatch of Salience between parties). This pathologizing of ASD as an individual inability to interpret beliefs, intentions and emotions in a way recognizable to neurotypical people has been called ‘the deficit theory of mind’, which locates ‘communication deficits’ as a problem with the autistic individual alone. As Mel Baggs (who was non-speaking) expands on in their short film In My Language, it is this deficit theory of mind which is the hegemonic perspective evident in the DSM-5’s diagnostic criteria; a perspective which does not consider that perhaps communication involves participatory, multidirectional translation and sense-making:
“I find it very interesting, by the way, that failure to learn your language is seen as a deficit, but failure to learn my language is seen as so natural that people like me are officially described as mysterious and puzzling, rather than anyone admitting that it is themselves who are confused, not autistic people or other cognitively disabled people who are inherently confusing. We are even viewed as non-communicative if we don’t speak the standard language, but other people are not considered non-communicative if they are so oblivious to our languages as to believe they don’t exist.”
Searching for the neurotypical ideal of how communication is ‘supposed’ to work (or at least how the DSM-5 seems to conceptualize appropriate/normative communication), I fell down a rabbit hole into the history of communication theory, ending up in the world of early computing science. In 1948, mathematical physicist and Bell employee Claude E Shannon published A Mathematical Theory of Communication in the Bell System Technical Journal. A year later, Shannon’s theory was popularized in book form together with professor Warren Weaver, who re-interpreted it for a broader scientific audience under the more authoritatively named, The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Weaver’s manuscript, which expanded Shannon’s calculus to wider and more philosophical considerations, would become known as the founding work of contemporary information theory.
The Shannon-Weaver model, as outlined in The Mathematical Theory of Communication by the above diagram, proposes a process by which a message sent from an information source becomes a message received at its destination, with any possible corruption or distortion of that message accounted for by noise: “any outside force which acts on the signal to vary it from the original” (more on noise another day). In 1953, a few years after the publication of the book, it was this model that Charles and Ray Eames used as the basis for their popular short film A Communications Primer – one of several commissions they would go on to produce for tech giant IBM “aimed at naturalizing the computer within the context of civilization's intellectual history and American consumerism”.
What does it mean that our contemporary Western theories of communication have their beginnings in the wartime birth of computing? Shannon himself was a cryptographer, interested in increasing the efficiency of electrical signal transmission, and Weaver was a mathematician specializing in machine translation. Neither were psychologists or social scientists, but in this period of rapid technological change in the early days of computing, Weaver in particular saw the potential for a much wider application of these ideas. Older industrial metaphors of brain-as-machine were rapidly being replaced by brain-as-computer, and the Shannon-Weaver model was quickly picked up and widely applied across the social sciences, including psychology. Despite contestation, the limits of these metaphors have stubbornly persisted, slipping silently into both the public consciousness and much psychological discourse[1].
Today in the field of communication theory, Shannon and Weaver’s model has much competition and has been heavily critiqued, including by Shannon himself, who anticipated its misapplication[2]. Still, it remains highly influential in the popular imagination (as some have written, the ‘mother of all communication theories’), and is the unidirectional lens through which ‘communication deficits’ found in the DSM-5 seem to be conceptualized.
What would it take to rethink communication beyond Shannon-Weaver and the DSM-5’s deficit theory of mind? As autistic social psychologist Damian Milton writes:
“an alternative account of autistic development is needed that is not rooted in notions of a social communication disorder, but of a different embodied way of being that can lead to effects on social interactions and understanding.“[3]
Milton’s Double Empathy Problem attempts to do this by reframing autism from a deficit theory of mind to a question of reciprocity and mutuality, proposing that the social and communication difficulties autistic people experience are not due to a lack of social skills or empathy, but due to differences in communication style between autistic people and neurotypicals, resulting in a reciprocal lack of understanding. Or maybe to put it in Krippendorff’s information-theory terms: “The readability of reproduced messages is a cultural issue, and goes beyond the theory. To understand each others’ messages, communicators must be literate in each others’ language communities.” Neurotypicals, as Milton and Baggs point out, are not necessarily literate in autistic culture and communication styles, and misinterpret their own confusion as autistic deficit.
As an alternative, Milton points to the work of philosopher and cognitive scientist Hanne de Jaegher and what she calls “participatory sense making”, a framework that “not only conceptualises autism at an interactional rather than individual level, but also places an emphasis on the understanding of how the active ‘online’ coordination that occurs between people is at the root of their mutual understanding and becoming.”[4]
Thinking in terms of double empathy or participatory sense making challenges the dominant pathologizing and individualizing discourses around autism which see social challenges as absolute deficits, rather than relationally constructed. As Milton rightly asserts, these concepts have the potential to “aid in reframing autism itself from a social communication disorder to a description of a broad range of developmental differences and embodied experiences and how they play out in specific social and cultural contexts. If this were so, it would lead to a radical change to current diagnostic criteria.”
And what then? To go back to da Silva and Understanding, could our mutual misunderstanding/miscommunication be separated from both deficit thinking and Understanding entirely? Rather than try to pathologize or unravel them, could we instead view our differences in communication styles“not as the manifestation of an unresolvable estrangement, but the expression of an elementary entanglement”? What relationships might be built on those terms?
This post is part of a month long series supported by the Canada Council for the Arts exploring the topic of mis/understanding and translation of neurodivergent knowledge, asking: what embodied neurodivergent knowledge is not (or perhaps should not be) translatable? What kind of relationships might we build if we begin from the assumption that we will not be able to understand one another? What might happen to our patterns of communication, if understanding of the other is not our ultimate goal?
Some of the thinking of this blog series has been translated to the short film, Lost in the Reeds.
Sources:
Krippendorff, Klaus. "Mathematical Theory of Communication", In Encyclopedia of Communication Theory, S. W. Littlejohn & K. A. Foss (Eds). Los Angeles: Sage, 2009. pp. 614-618.
Milton, D., Gurbuz, E., & López, B. (2022). “The ‘double empathy problem’: Ten years on.” Autism, 26(8), 1901–1903.
Seising, Rudolph. “60 years "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" - Towards a "Fuzzy Information Theory”. IFSA-EUSFLAT 2009.
[1] In her recent book The Extended Mind, Annie Murphy Paul attempts to poetically update these metaphors to ‘the mind-as-magpie’, showing how thinking extends not linearly or mechanistically, but relationally even beyond the physical limits of the body.
[2] As Klaus Krippendorff argues, Shannon’s theory has been popularly misunderstood as a linear communication model based on the simplified diagram alone, not Shannon’s calculus, which is also applicable to circular communication structures. This misunderstanding, which Shannon himself anticipated in “refusing to call his calculus information theory”, has “encouraged many researchers to treat humans as channels of communication and measure their capacity of processing information”. Krippendorff argues that in reality, “Shannon’s model provides a versatile calculus, not a particular communication model…the theory does not presume that communicators share the same repertoire of messages, for example, having the same preconceptions or speaking the same language. By quantifying how choices made at one point affect those made at another, the theory asserts fundamental limits on all levels of human communication”.
[3] Milton et al. 2022
[4] Ibid.