Okay, I said that our next speaker is Victor Fernandez Castro
from the Department of Philosophy in the University of Granada.
Victor will present this paper in collaboration
with Miguel Nunez de Prado-Gordillo from the same university.
Victor is Associate Professor in the University
of Granada, specialized on philosophy of mind.
And he will talk about speaking one's mind in terms
of neurotic injustice and agency in mental health.
Thank you.
- Thank you so much.
Thank you, Agatha and the organizers
for organizing such a nice and beautiful event.
I have learned a lot.
I'm also very grateful to give this talk
after Laura's and Claudia's talk precisely
because Miguel and I started to think about this topic
just one year and a half ago, when actually Claudia came to Granada
and gave us a talk about impostor concepts.
And we started to think about what
happened when we have someone trying to,
who has two different interpretation about
one experience, one from one impostor concept
and the other one for a bona fide concept, let's say,
on how we can have different criteria to distinguish
which one is the good one, which one is the good concept.
Now, after their talk, I'm not sure that I will,
this is the appropriate way to characterize
the phenomenon that we're going to talk about.
Probably there is some mix between
impostor uses and neurological clashes,
but I will keep talking about impostor concepts.
So yeah, this is something that I have.
This is a talk that I have with Miguel Nunez-De Prado.
Of course, if there is something deeply wrong
or I'm misleading in this talk, it's his fault.
So just to give a,
just for starting with something that somehow captured
the experience that we want to talk about, we have
here Jim Sinclair, neurodivergent activist who say,
"I find great value and meaning in my life.
I have no wish to be cured of myself.
If you will help me, don't try to chain me to feed your wall
and grant me the dignity of meeting me on my own terms,
recognize that we are equally alien to each other,
that my ways of being are not merely damaged versions of yours.
" Our insight is that not granted,
the dignity that Sinclair is asking for
here amounts to a power of injustice,
one that is widespread in mental health
settings and one that force some individuals,
in particular, we are thinking on mad neurodivergent,
mentally ill, to speak their mind in tongues
that actually do not capture their own experience.
That somehow force them to self-interpret their experience
in ways that hinder their agency and self-expression of possibilities.
Part of what motivated the talk also has to do
with this idea of if this kind of injustice actually epistemic.
The motivation behind this question is precisely,
as I said before, that we started to think about
if we can have actually criteria to distinguish
when a particular concept is imposter or a bona fide concept.
We think that there are criteria and these criteria is epistemic.
Perhaps now, after the previous talk,
I'm not so sure, maybe we are somehow
mixing the playing of the epistemology
with the playing of this existential self-understanding,
but at least we think that are somehow
connected, that we can discuss this later.
But in any sense, we are thinking about
a point of emiratical injustice concerning
the epistemic good of self-understanding.
And not only epistemic, we believe that this kind
of injustice also produce other kind of injustice.
For instance, we are thinking about
the psychological undermining, for example.
Of course, Claudia and Laura gave far more example of this.
And as they also said, those kinds of emiratical injustice
are sometimes motivated by conceptual lacunas.
And that's why in the case of neurodiversity,
many people, both neurotypical and neurotypical,
when they are somehow trying to understand each other,
they understand each other like some
sort of alien they experience sometimes.
But what we are also worried about is our
idea of, of course, conceptual occupations,
all these kind of phenomena like imposter concept
where somehow a particular concept that is not appropriate
or a bona fide concepts force those people
to interpret their experience from a different point of view.
Also, we understand this not only as a conceptual task,
but also as a political task in the sense that we believe
that better understanding of those kind of phenomenon
can help us to understand, not only understand,
but also detecting and addressing those injustices.
Also, that's why it's important to be capable
of distinguishing between this kind of
concept, imposter and bona fide concepts.
Our theoretical goals have to do with this
idea of contributing to the distinction,
see exactly how we can find certain criteria to distinguish them.
But there is some probitious about that.
We don't think that the boundaries
between imposter concept and bona fide concepts
are boundaries that can be drowned once and for all.
Also, we believe that any criteria should be assessed
in terms of the ability to spot or intervene an injustice.
And our focus will be neurodiversity
on new forms of mental self-interpretation.
Our political goal is to somehow uplift neurodivergence
standing in the struggle of recognition.
So I'm just saying that because, well, I don't
think this should be made explicit in this concept,
but I would say that if someone doesn't align
with the political claims of
neurodivergency, that's not a talk for you.
So what I'm going to try to do today is first I will talk about this.
When we started to think about the distinction
between imposter and bona fide concept,
we were trying to put ourselves in a position
of someone who somehow experienced some sort of ambiguity
about how to understand their experience
in the sense that sometimes one can have
the experience of ambiguity when experiencing
a particular thought or an action
and not having clear whether if this experience
or action can be interpreted as a part of
the self or as a part of something different.
I will call this the self-imposed ambiguity.
And we will try to argue,
well, not actually, I'm not even giving arguments, I think,
but we're trying to somehow motivate the
idea that if someone wants to distinguish
between this bona fide and imposter concepts, there are two options.
One, of course, is to decide that the criteria
has to do with a realist interpretation
of the distinction between the self and mental illness
or neurodivergence or pathology or whatever.
We think that this position is just wrong.
But then we will try to motivate
a more constructivist position about that,
ones where these boundaries between the self
and the neurodivergence and the illness could be negotiated.
Then we will illustrate a case that has to do with the scheming.
We will see later why this low-hand
versus quite-hand has to do with this.
How the way neurodivergent, the autistic community,
but also other kind of neurodivergent people
understand the game of scheming can help
us to, or somehow we believe that the way
that one can understand this phenomenon
somehow support this more constructivist position.
And finally, we will try to say a bit
about how this view can be accommodated
with the idea that there are criteria
to distinguish bona fide concept and imposter concepts,
in which sense that has to do with the notion of reality,
even without undertaking the commitment
of our realism about mental states.
So there are many ambiguities in psychiatry.
The kind of phenomena that we are picking up
are things like the difficulties determining
whether an agent's action, thought, and experience
express the authentic self or some mental condition.
There are different examples of that.
For example, the distinction between self
and the ambiguity, people who experience this ambiguity
because they are not sure about whether
particular thought and action is part of
themselves or part of their mental condition.
There are others like self-mask ambiguity
that has to do with the notion of masking,
which is this idea that many people,
especially autistic people, often behave
in a way that somehow masks their identity.
They try to behave as neurotypical people,
and sometimes they have problems to genuinely see
their action as produced by themselves
or this mask that they have produced
to interact with neurotypical people.
We are interested in this kind of,
this kind of thing where it seems that many
times in the discussion of neurodiversity
or the neurodiversity try to navigate between these two monster,
which is the wrongful behind pathologizing their condition
versus the pathologizing narratives that sometimes are also problematic.
In the first, of course, in the first case,
because usually understanding the condition as a pathology
come with some kind of hopelessness about
recovery with loss of cell efficacy,
but also for neurodiversity, for the neurodivergent,
sometimes understanding or embracing the narrative
of the pathologizing is also problematic
because it comes with some over-attribution of agency,
like blaming other psychological demeaning attitude
toward their failures to meet social expectations.
This is something that Federico put on the table yesterday,
this idea that many autistics actually don't feel,
they feel disabled, even though they don't think
the disability can be necessarily understood as some sort of pathology.
Anne Sinclair captured this tension
between these two narratives when she said,
"My greatest difficulties are minimized,
"my greatest strengths are invalidated.
" One example that is interesting
that can be found also in the literature about psychiatry
is, for example, the case of depression,
where we have people that try to provide
some sort of romanticizing narrative framing depression,
this idea that depression is a mark of genius or poetic sensitivity,
and this narrative of course can obscure,
can debilitate and trivialize the significance
and do not recognize the harm of consequences of depression.
And then on the other hand, you have activists arguing that
at least some depressive traits can be
rightfully pre-framed as a sort of dangerous gift
in a way that highlights a strength tied to the condition,
but at the same time, recognizing this harmful condition,
and of course, because they consider
that framing depression in this way
has of course potential therapeutic value.
And the issue here of course is how would we adjudicate
between self and condition-based narrative,
how could we decide which narrative can be the more accurate?
If we see that in the terms of imposter concept,
how can or how could we tell apart proper
from improper concept or bona fide concept from imposter concept
when interpreting an agent's mental makeup?
This is the basic question for us.
Of course, one way to try to answer this question
is just assuming some sort of realism
and consider that there are a clear cut
pre-existing boundaries between self and the particular condition.
So that would make the things relatively easy.
If we have these boundaries and we can detect these boundaries,
then we can determine whether a concept is imposter or bona fide,
because this is just a matter of empirical discovery, right?
Depending on whether it's accurately tracked this device.
We need more empirical evidence in order to decide
whether some concept is an imposter concept or is a bona fide concept.
This comes with many problems.
Some of them is like,
come with a very easy little perspective,
like either romanticizing narratives are appropriate or not.
And these are how preclude the possibility that for some people,
some of those narratives could be helpful
therapeutic for others shouldn't be.
So there's no possibility of some sort of
pencil person, certain centric approach to this.
Also, reinforce the epistemic standing of experts
by training in the sense that at the end of the day,
if it's a question of empirical discovery,
then only experts that can have access
to this empirical evidence can solve these issues.
And also, the problem also is that they somehow block
some ameliorative actions in the sense that
where those clear cut boundaries cannot be drawn
or because we don't have the evidence yet,
realism seems to recommend to suspend the judgment
and then paralyzing any effort to address those perceived injustice.
So this criticism can be, we understand this as a sort of a perspective
or objectivism that naturally fit with naturalism,
essentialism, all these view about the mind.
And we also connect this with this theoretical framework
that reinforce that we agree with all these analysis
that connect those kinds of theoretical framework
with the reinforcement of epistemic injustice.
Actually, Robert Chapman press on this idea when they say,
where they cannot see clear biological essences,
those committed to objectivism and essentialism
will take themselves to be justified
in talking over members of marginalized minorities,
whether in terms of neurodivergence of gender identity.
So the other possibilities to go for constructivism,
just assume that somehow the self-conditioned divide
is not ready-made, but somehow constructed.
Of course, it's not a matter of
discovery, but a matter of interpretation.
There is somehow decision on whether to endorse
the condition versus self-based narrative
are not just justified by empirical discovery,
but by pondering on the practical consequences
and commitments that follow from different narrative
on how the person identify with this.
Of course, that doesn't mean that facts are not important.
Facts constrain interpretation, of course,
but they are not the ultimate determinant of those interpretation.
And that fits quite well with some of our previous work,
some work that we made with Virginia.
But now, of course, there are also some sort of anxiety
that arise when someone take this constructivist
position, which is, well, if there is no,
friction, there's no friction, there's
no border, it's a matter of construction.
That's also, that seems to press on a very relativist,
anything goes, or some sort of anything goes relativism.
We like to, we have intuition that there are criteria,
but those criteria are not criteria that you,
that are golden rule that you can use always.
And that's precisely what allows to this kind of position
to be more particularly some person-centered.
And one way, the kind of solution that we would like
to explore is the idea that the criteria
are somehow connected to the idea of agency and self-recognition.
We would like to press on this idea by looking at a particular example,
which is the case of autistic stimming, right?
What is stimming?
Well, stimming is usually defined
like a repetitive, selfish, stimulatory behavior.
Example of these are flapping, grogging,
making repetitive sounds, typically displayed
by autistic and other neurodivergent people.
And there are two characterization that you can,
that you find in the literature about this.
One of course has to do with the understanding
this kind of behavior or self-regulator as a sort of deficit, right?
Typically you can find in the literature,
especially in psychiatric literature,
where they describe the stimming as a sort of abnormal,
involuntary, bizarre, purposeless or meaningless repetitive behavior.
And in this sense, it's understood as a sort of
final deficit, like a sort of self-regulated deficit.
But in the autistic literature or in the neurodiversity literature,
there are other, a different interpretation of what is going on here.
The idea is that stimming is a sort of harmless,
important and meaningful expression of autistic joy,
rather than a weird or unnecessary or meaningless body movement.
And they usually understand this as a sort of
exercise of neurodivergent self-regulation.
One thing that is interesting is that we can understand this difference
between how one understand the function or the expression
of stimming from as a sort of language creation.
This is like what Dineshak argue where,
and they reclaim, and she puts this idea of
using of reinterpretation of what is going on
with stimming as a sort of reclamation practice
in the sense that this is a sort of language creation
whereby autistic people render their experience
more intelligible to both other and themselves,
rather than feeding a conceptual lagoon
or what they are doing using this exercise of reclaiming
or giving a different meaning to stimming
is just a kind of retooling of ordinary language
as well as the autistic specialist
language used by professional researchers.
So part of the idea here is that there is no conceptual,
they are feeding a conceptual lagoon in a sense.
It's a form of hermeneutical reparation, we believe,
whereby autistic people regain this sense of self-worth
and self-respect, increase their self-expression possibilities.
For example, Julia Vascones said,
"Terra can read my flapping better than my face.
"You have got one for everything," she says,
"and I wish everyone could look at my hand and see.
"I need you to slow down, or this is the best thing ever,
"or I can please toach, or I am so hungry
"I think my brain is trying to eat itself.
" She's pointing out to the kind of reclaiming of meaning
regarding those kind of scheming behavior.
But also we believe that there is a form of hermeneutical reparation
in the sense that the pre-stores their agency,
increasing the ability to navigate difficult situation
by anticipating and regulating their own reaction.
For example, they use scheming as a sort of prevention for meltdown.
And here you can see this autistic language creation
or this reclamation of those behaviors
as a sort of meaningful expression,
as a sort of neither will or natural,
or let's say normal behavior, neither apathology.
In a sense, it avoids this over and under attribution of agency.
One says what they are doing is trying to navigate
these two monsters that I mentioned before.
So why we think this lesson is important for our point?
What can tell us about the distinction
between bona fide and imposter concept?
Well, we can take the benefits of what they are doing,
the self-expressions, their work and agency
as future of what makes a concept bona fide.
And that's part of our point here is that precisely
what make those substitution of concept or let's say, or reparation.
And as I said before, now I'm not so sure that I can characterize that
would be semi-nautical clash or whatever,
is that can help us to see in which sense
we can distinguish or the bona fide and imposter concept
by other criteria, which are that can be
or cannot be epistemic in the traditional sense.
Make it compatible with our view of constructivism.
Of course, here the answer is, but is this really epistemic?
There are different ways to approach this.
One of them actually come from our colleagues
where they think that those kind of notion
like self-expressions or even agency
are also important for the epistemic producers
in the sense that if, for example, something undermines your agency,
it's also undermining your epistemic agency
because it's undermined your reliability
in your own capacities for producing knowledge, for example.
But we would like to go in different ways.
So first, but to understanding the idea that we are trying to track,
there are two different readings of this creation of language
that Vinny Shack distinguishing in her paper,
and that we think it is important.
The first one is clearly epistemic
when she's discussing this idea of understanding
and skimming from this particular point of view.
What she said, well, this language
or understanding the skimming from this,
when we give meaning or when the artists,
they give meaning to skimming in those
way, what they are doing is somehow,
is something that somehow enables
description of what it's like to be autistic,
informs others about the person's mental
state or pre-constituted mental states.
We think that this is clearly epistemic.
So there is an epistemic advantage of this,
but also there is a different way in which we think
that somehow this giving meaning to skimming could be important,
and that has to do with this other aspect that Vinny Shack highlight,
which is the idea that there's more radical reading
of significance and alternative that Hagen introduced,
which is the idea that the language
creation is not so much about describing
already well-defined autistic experience,
but constituting autistic experience.
So part of, as they understand it,
part of what the autistic community is doing
by giving meaning to those kind of behavior
is not just to make it make it more transparent for other,
but somehow reconfiguring their own mental states.
So we believe that also, this is epistemic in another important sense.
Actually, I think that only a realist
can fail to see this as an epistemic.
Only if one think about the mental and constitute
independently from our interpretative practice,
then you can defend that this is not an epistemic position.
But of course, if you have a more constructive view
about the mind, where constitutive mind
is partially has to do precisely with creating this
kind of meaning, because as some sort of projection
about their commitments and how this,
and actually this is part of what is to have in a mind,
then also mentally, and there is a constitution of the mind.
And then this is also epistemic in this important sense of creating
a reality in itself, which is a way of saying that you are somehow
creating an identity and knowing at the same time.
And in this sense, we believe that
when you are generating this kind of language,
you are somehow configuring your mind.
And that's also helps you to understand
actually your own position in a way that could be understood epistemic
in the very same sense of self understanding.
In the sense that you are understanding
which position you have with the rest of the reality.
And I would like to finish with this citation of Iris Murdoch
that somehow capture what we think you gain
when you are start to give meaning to some of
your action that somehow confuses your mind,
which is what she's talking about a different thing
would have to be with the moral realm.
But she said, "Moral differences look less like a difference of choice,
given the same facts are more like difference of vision.
In other words, a moral judgment seems like a movable
and extensible ring laid down to cover a certain area of facts,
and more like a total different of gestalt.
We differ not only because we select different object
out of the same world, but because we see different worlds.
" So part of the idea here is that when you,
if you understand the distinction between the condition
and the self as something you construct
at the moment that you give meaning to some of your action
in a very particular way, with a particular interpretation,
you start to see yourself for a different gestalt.
And that is something epistemically valuable there
and not only metaphysical or existential.
That's all.
(laughs) Thank you.
- Yep, plenty of time for questions, comments.
(silence)
In English or Spanish?
(speaking in Spanish)
(laughing)
(speaking in Spanish)
(laughing)
(speaking in Spanish)
Okay, we finish now.
We have five minutes for a quick rest.
(laughing)
(speaking in Spanish)