This paper investigates what it is to understand human differences in terms of deficits and examines criticisms of this approach. In the past few decades, across many fields of inquiry and outside the academy there has been a surge of interest in critiquing "the deficit view" of all manner of group differences and deviations from the norm.  But what exactly is meant by "deficit view" and related terms when they figure in accounts of human differences?  Do critics of the deficit view claim that they are never appropriate or that particular applications of the approach are inappropriate?  The aim of this paper is twofold: to identify and articulate some of the conceptual issues at the heart of debates about deficit approaches and to examine how these issues matter. Autism is my focus case. As we will see, many critiques of the deficit view of autism tend to characterize what is problematic about taking a deficit view in terms of the personal and social harm that deficit views can or do effect.  One important upshot of my discussion, I argue, is that there is another kind of drawback to deficit thinking that is independent of the deficit view's potential negative personal and social consequences, a drawback that deserves serious consideration and sustained critical attention: in some instances, at least, deficit views impede scientific and philosophical progress in our understanding of the phenomena themselves.  Thus, articulating and assessing deficit approaches is of practical and theoretical importance.

Metaphor—describing one thing in terms of another—is a common tool used to grasp what is unknown. Perhaps because we do not understand a lot about autism, many metaphors appear in both scientific and nonscientific descriptions of autism. The metaphor of mindblindness is especially pervasive in the scientific literature. We discuss three limitations of this metaphor: It obscures the fact that both autistic and non autistic individuals contribute to the social and communicative difficulties between them, it carries strong negative connotations, and it may impede the recognition that some autistic behaviors are meaningful and adaptive. Researchers should be mindful of the potential consequences of metaphors.

Warlaumont, Richards, Gilkerson, and Oller (2014) described a social feedback loop whereby greater contingency of parents' responses to their children's speechlike vocalizations predicts their children's production of more speechlike vocalizations. In applying this model to autism spectrum disorder (ASD), Warlaumont et al. reported two primary findings: First, children with ASD produced fewer speechlike vocalizations than did typically developing (TD) children, and second, the responses of parents of autistic children were less contingent on their children's vocalizations being speech related than were the responses of parents of TD children. The authors proposed that this disruption in the social feedback loop has cascading effects that may help explain the atypical speech development characteristic of ASD. We critique the application of this model to ASD on two grounds: It fails to take into account the well-documented motor difficulties of autistic individuals, and, in privileging speech, it overlooks the dynamic nature of communicative motivation.Warlaumont et al. acknowledged that motor differences may lead autistic children to produce fewer vocalizations than TD children do. But their model does not account for autistic children's specific difficulty in producing speechlike sounds. There is a high comorbidity between autism and apraxia, a motor disorder affecting the ability to coordinate the movements necessary for speech. The prevalence of childhood apraxia is 0.1% to 0.2% among the general population (Shriberg, Aram, & Kwiatkowski, 1997), but may be as high as 60% among autistic children (Tierney et al., 2015). Additionally, some autistic individuals report difficulty producing speech reliably (e.g., Higashida, 2013;Robledo, Donnellan, & Strandt-Conroy, 2012). If individuals cannot reliably produce speechlike sounds, a model of speech development 647520P SSXXX10.

Epistemic injustice" picks out a wide and varied collection of phenomena that can be characterized broadly as "forms of unfair treatment that relate to issues of knowledge, understanding, and participation in communicative practices" (Kidd, Medina, and Pohlhaus 2017, 1). Miranda Fricker, in well-known and influential work (2003 and 2007), identifies and carefully examines two kinds of epistemic injustice, testimonial and hermeneutical. Roughly speaking, testimonial injustice concerns credibility assessments of testimony. It occurs when a hearer gives a speaker less credibility than the hearer would otherwise have

Background: Stevenson et al. (2011) examined photographs and language used to represent autism on chapter websites for the Autism Society of America, autism charity websites, movies, television shows, fictional books, and U.S. new stories, and found that they overwhelmingly used children to represent autism.Methods: Using Stevenson et al.'s methods, we tested the hypothesis that, a decade on, these same sources would now include more representations of autistic adults. We statistically compared our findings to theirs. Results:On the chapter websites of the Autism Society of America and in fictional books, the hypothesis was supported in that there were more representations of adults (20%) than in the original study (5%), but there were still far more representations of children than of adults. In movies, television shows, and U.S. news stories, there were equal numbers of representations of autistic adults and autistic children. Conclusions:These findings suggest a move away from infantilizing autism in some domains, but they rely on a narrow construal of "infantilizing": the underrepresentation of autistic adults in media. However, even when autistic adults are represented, they may still be infantilized in various ways. Future research will need to examine the impact of infantilizing media on both autistic and non-autistic people, and other ways in which these representations are limited (e.g., gender and race/ethnicity).How will these findings help autistic adults now or in the future? Knowing about representation of autistic adults is important because of the many potential benefits of accurate representation, such as access to accommodations and resources beyond childhood (e.g., jobs, healthcare). Positive media representations may also help reduce stigma and stereotypes.