Autism spectrum disorder and tautism: A prefix issue? Epistemicide and ableism in the critical analysis of infocommunication

Abstract

Objective: This work is a debate about the ethical and onto-epistemological effects of the tautism concept (a neologism which combines tautology and autism) as a criticism of the so-called confusional communication, in which disinformation and the end of communication would be its immediate products. Lucien Sfez elaborated the concept of tautism in the scope of Information Theory. Without disregarding the legitimacy, relevance, and timeliness of the problem presented by Sfez, the article reflects on the appropriation of the term “autism” for the construction of metaphors based on temporal and contextual definitions of the spectrum, a domain still under development.

Methods: We used basic, descriptive study, with a qualitative approach, bibliography and hermeneutic analysis. The theoretical methodological route examines Lucien Sfez's concepts of tautism and confusional communication in opposition to Barbara Cassin's sophistic reading of language.

Results: Based on critical informational and language studies, there is an argument that the Western hegemonic Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction strengthens the use of the Greek prefix –autos in the institution of autistic identity as an individual alien to reality. Consequently, this individual is a non-subject endowed with logos, opening a gap for empowering and epistemic representations of the assessed population, their knowledge, and practices.

Conclusions: As information scientists, we check the terminological footprints that do not reflect the universal but that point to historicity. The ontological gesture of exclusion founds tautism, whose negative metaphorology safeguards a legitimate problem: the physical, mental, and political effects which emerge from the digitization of activities and processes captured and managed by companies and governments with their own interests. Although Sfez develops a critical argument towards communication as a symbolic and ideological form, he reinforces an autonomous technical rationality in the figure of Frankenstein.