I’d like to argue for a pluralism of human rationality, that is, that different persons deploy forms of reasoning which are structurally quite different from one another. Such a statement seems, on the face of things, to be obvious, and so it is interesting to note how we do not seem to deploy it in everyday interactions.

What are these differences and how are they constituted?

The first form I’d describe is a difference between working from ideas vs. working from problems. I’ve encountered this in my own daily practice, with scholarly colleagues reflecting upon the ideas they find in books, deploying them as forms of arguments in a relatively free-standing way in debate. In my own mode of reflection, ideas must be situated in some kind of problem or solution context. This is not part of an intellectual programme by which I mean to establish the importance of context through a form of stubborn refusal to engage with ideas lacking in context, and it is important to establish this as many scholars I know do engage in this tactic (with my blessing). What I mean is that I cannot process information coming from various sources without being able to place it in the context of production, that is, why did this information come to be, what prompt, problem or challenge provided the catalyst for the production of this information. If I do not possess this knowledge, everythign coming at me feels very slippery and only with great and artificial effort can I put it in places which synthesise it as information and locate it within a space of understanding (and by extension long-term memory) and comprehension, as opposed to pure noise which fades away quickly.

Now it may be tempting to describe this experience as a problem, a deviation from the norm, or a disability requiring accommodation. Much of my formal learning has treated me as such (albeit implicitly in most cases), where the expectation of proper cognitive functioning was to find ways to translate information coming to me and do so in a way which was as seamless as possible for the person delivering it. This is the way that our culture of disability and accommodations can often reify difference as pathology. The trouble with this is that processing information in the way that I do is clearly not inferior in many ways. To give a few examples, because my mind is constantly looking for a problem and the context for a range of phenomena, I am a skilled diagnostician, often detecting issues intuitively ahead of others, and with more intractable problems, I am able to very quickly deploy deduction and inference (in ways that colleagues who have different ways of thinking are unable to follow without slowdown and narration) in a systematic way towards an understanding of what is happenning. Pedagogical researchers have pointed to the benefits of problem-based inquiry as a mode of teaching and learning which can embed knowledge in more practical and enduring ways for a wide variety of learners. This situation where accommodations for autistic persons can serve as a kind of “rising tide which lifts all boats” strikes me as an important thing to observe. If the unique traits which are being singled out are a problem, and by extension niche and exotic, why is it that forms of accommodation actually deploy a wider range of benefits?

This is just one of many possible examples of ways that processing information and the process of aquiring understanding can be constituted in quite different ways. For some people with the condition known as synesthesia, information is processed in terms of colours, and by extension, things with colour can literally “speak” to them. Some persons with autism have a special facility for intuitively connecting with and communicating with animals. While much attention has been devoted to the ways in which autistic communication can be “overly” literal, there are other forms which veer towards indirect significations of meaning. In some noteworthy cases, people speak using allegories and metaphors in the foreground, leaving co-communicators to process the signification of meaning.

What does this mean for us? I think there is a need to consider first how our own forms of thought and developing understanding represent a unique constellation of processes. We reach understanding with others by constructing bridges out of that uniqueness and into another which is foreign to us. That we do this every day and in every interaction is usually utterly transparent to us, until we reach forms of difference which are more challenging to bridge and require additional work. Sometimes there is a complete breakdown in understanding or communication, which has been represented in the “double empathy” problem. But breakdown in communicaton ought not be seen as a disability in one person, requiring adaptation on their part or accommodation on the part of the receiver, but an unusal level of challenge for a completely regular process.