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Autistic Self-Awareness
- Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 11, Number 3, September 2004
- pp. 235-251
- 10.1353/ppp.2004.0066
- Article
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A currently popular view traces autistic cognitive abnormalities to a defective capacity for theorizing about other minds. Two prominent researchers, Uta Frith and Francesca Happé, extend this account by tracing further autistic abnormalities to impaired self-consciousness. This paper argues that Frith and Happé's account requires a treatment of autistic self-report that is problematic on both methodological and philosophical grounds. However, the philosophical problems point to an alternative account of self-awareness and self-report in normal individuals; and this account gives us a methodologically more attractive approach to explaining autistic abnormalities.