Me: "I have a new article out!"
The AI: "That sucks, bud."
03.03.2026 15:31
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Me: "I have a new article out!"
The AI: "That sucks, bud."
altmetric sentiment analysis is so funny. It's always like "49% of mentions of your work are STRONG NEGATIVE", and then it's just my own posts on BlueSky.
Sorry about that!
Ugh, I know. There was a typo in the .bib file that permeated through the rest of the article. I already contacted the editor to see if we could fix it, so I am hoping it's updated soon!
Extending my critique, @malinowska.bsky.social et al. argue the persistence of the ToM paradigm in autism research is driven by underdetermination, epistemic-network dynamics, and the institutional payoff of standardization, rather than by its empirical strength.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Accessible, popular summary of some of the points made in this article has also been published in the Conversation (@uk.theconversation.com). Many more links within.
doi.org/10.64628/AB....
In my response to these commentaries, I shift focus from the "that" question (that ToM-deficit framework is pseudoscience) to the question of why it persists (social dynamics and institutional forces).
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Baron-Cohen (and friends) disagree. They argue that decades of converging meta-analytic evidence robustly show that autistic people, on average, have dimensional degrees of ToM disability that meaningfully relate to social functioning and should not be dismissed.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Dwyer agrees strong versions are harmful and outdated, but questions labelling weak ToM research as pseudoscientific. It may still offer modest insightsβif pursued cautiously, without deficit-based assumptions, and along social change/interdisciplinary dialogue.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Kleberg argues that instead of abandoning ToM research as degenerative, the field should reconceptualise ToM as a heterogeneous set of dissociable processes, investigating how distinct social-cognitive components map onto autismβs diverse developmental profiles
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Rajan supports the claim that the ToM deficit model is degenerating / ad hoc, while further arguing that even reformist alternatives risk presupposing autism as a stable, measurable property and thus leave deeper ontological and political assumptions unexamined.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Bulding on my critique, Gernsbacher argues the persistence of the ToM-deficit account of autism reflects not just empirical weakness but its entanglement with historical narratives, systemic bias, and institutional incentives within psychological science.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Gough agrees that the ToM-deficit hypothesis should be abandoned, but questions whether pseudoscience is the right framing, arguing instead that ToM research is dehumanising and methodologically deficient regardless of how it is classified in demarcation debates.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Further analysis by Morris and Zelazo supports my argument that both strong / weak versions of the ToM deficit hypothesis are empirically unsupported, constituting a degenerating research programme better replaced by neurodiversity-informed alternatives.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
The article is accompanied by eight commentaries, and my reply to these commentaries.
I also argue that progressive alternatives exist (e.g., accounts informed by the neurodiversity paradigm), satisfying Lakatosβs requirement that a research programme be superseded by a more progressive rival.
Hence, the theory-of-mind-deficit explanation of autism should be abandoned.
The implications are nontrivial.
The ToM-deficit model has shaped diagnostic discourse, clinical interventions, textbook psychology, legal reasoning, and public understanding of autism
A degenerative framework at this level has downstream consequences.
The paperβs central claim is therefore stronger than prior critiques that βthis is bad science.β
It is that continued adherence to the theory-of-mind-deficit explanation, in light of its degenerative trajectory, renders the research programme pseudoscientific in Lakatosian terms.
Rather than abandoning the hypothesis, proponents have:
- Expanded the definition of ToM to include its alleged precursors.
- Reinterpreted failures as developmental delays.
Modified task designs without resolving construct concerns.
- Treated autistic self-report as secondary.
A programme becomes degenerative when:
- Auxiliary hypotheses are introduced ad hoc.
- Goalposts shift to accommodate counterevidence.
- Novel predictions fail to receive empirical support.
I argue that the ToM-deficit programme exhibits precisely these features.
The critique is not limited to empirical shortcomings.
Drawing on Imre Lakatosβs Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, I evaluates the ToM-deficit account at the level of scientific practice.
The central question: why has the hypothesis persisted despite sustained anomalies?
The weak version appears more modestβbut collapses under methodological scrutiny. I review evidence that:
- ToM tasks (false belief, faux pas, RMET, etc.) often fail to converge.
- Replication failures are common.
- Linguistic demands confound performance.
- Measures lack construct validity.
This view has already been critiqued repeatedly. See, e.g., Pellicano, 2011 (doi.org/10.1017/CBO9...) and especially Gernsbacher and Yergeau, 2019 (doi.org/10.1037/arc0...)
Empirically, the strong version fails on standard criteria for explanatory adequacy:
- ToM deficits are not universal among autistic people.
- They are not unique to autism.
- They lack causal precedence.
- They do not adequately explain the heterogeneity of autistic traits.
For decades, the theory-of-mind (ToM) framework has shaped cognitive accounts of autism.
Two broad versions persist:
- Strong version: autism is fundamentally caused by a ToM deficit.
- Weak version: autistic individuals often exhibit ToM difficulties.
I argue that both are untenable.
Just published in Psychological Inquiry!
I offer a sustained philosophical and empirical critique of the theory-of-mind-deficit explanation of autism.
The ultimate conclusion is that the research programme has become degenerativeβand therefore pseudoscientific.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
I wrote a whole book that raises / addresses a lot of the questions in this thread re: P-A problems and value alignment! (Including a chapter on who the principal is).
broadviewpress.com/product/arti...
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First page of article "What do philosophers talk about when they talk about autism", published in Synthese. Information includes the title, doi (10.1007/s11229-025-05116-1), year (2025), author names (Travis LaCroix, Alexis Amero, Benjamin Sidloski), recieved date (10 October 2024), accepted date (12 June 2025), copyright information (the authors, 2025), abstract ("Several anecdotal claims about the relationship between philosophical discourse and the subject of autism have been forwarded in recent years. This paper seeks to verify or debunk these descriptive claims by carefully examining the philosophical literature on autism. We conduct a comprehensive scoping review to answer the question, what do philosophers talk about when they talk about autism? This empirical work confirms that the philosophy of autism is underdeveloped as a subfield of philosophy. Moreover, the way that philosophers engage with autism is often unreflective and uncritical. As a result, much work in the discipline serves to perpetuate pathologising, dehumanising, and stigmatising misinformation about autistics and autistic behaviour. By highlighting the significant gaps in the philosophical literature on autism, this review aims to deepen our understanding of philosophical thought surrounding autism and contributes to ongoing dialogues pertaining to neurodiversity, madness, and disability rights more generally.") and keywords (Autism Β· Neurodiversity Β· The philosophy of autism Β· Scoping literature review).
I will post more summaries of the results of our search later, but the full article / data summary / analysis can be found (open access!) here:
doi.org/10.1007/s112...
Line graph titled "publications per year." It shows that the number of publications mentioning autism in a given year is trending upward. Each year (1945-2023) is represented on the x-axis, with the number of articles on the y-axis. The maximum is 87 articles in 2021. A dashed line is fitted to the number of articles (blue line), which is steadily increasing in the last 40 years.
Line graph (describing rate of change) and line graph with area underneath filled (describing cumulative distribution), titled "number of publications per year (cumulative distribution)." It shows that the rate of publications mentioning autism in a given year is trending upward. Each year (1945-2023) is represented on the x-axis, with percent (cumulative distribution) on the left y-axis and the rate of change on the right y-axis.
Examining philosophical works mentioning autism across time, we found: (1) the number of articles has increased significantly in the last decade or two. (2) The rate of change is also trending upward in the last two decades. (3) The majority (> 50%) of the corpus was published in the last decade.