Social Actions, Gestalt Coherence, and Designations of Disability: Lessons from and about Autism

Abstract

This article has three main points: (1) “gestalt objects” are not just perceptual chimera, but are a feature of everyday talk and social action; (2) a disability such as autism can be treated in terms of the intelligence it may gloss as comprising analyzable practices-in-interaction; and (3) the sociology of deviance and social problems can benefit from studies of the intrinsic orderliness of everyday talk and social interaction in both regular, or ordinary, and more specialized settings such as clinics. The data are two segments from a testing and diagnostic center for developmental disabilities in the United States. Each segment involves a child who is diagnosed with autism and is being administered a test that poses questions such as, “What do you do when you're hungry?” The puzzle this test presents is to account for the patterns of both standard (commonsensical) and non-standard (autistic) answering. In accounting for patterns of answering, I use ordinary conversational instances of “what do you do when x happens?” to reveal the logic required in the test, and to describe both commonsense and autistic intelligence. Interactionally, autistic answering may reverse a structural preference for gestalt or global interpretation of utterances in favor of stimulus-bound, local understandings.