Book review: Understanding blindness

Abstract

Simon Baron-Cohen is well known to researchers in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, largely on the strength of Mindblindness(Baron-Cohen 1997), his important book on the origins and nature of autism. He has now followed up that book with The Essential Difference (Baron-Cohen 2003), a much more ambitious work which aims to explain not only autism, once again, but also the (alleged) essential differences between men and women. This is a book which aims to reach a much wider audience. It is therefore important to examine it, both because it is the product of an important thinker, and because it is likely to have an impact on the wider intellectual climate. Unfortunately, The Essential Difference is a very disappointing book. There are many things wrong with it. But its central fault is one that is all too characteristic of a great deal of work in psychology. It is the complete innocence of a conception of reason that is, broadly, phenomenological.1 Phenomenology’s most important contribution to our intellectual tradition, I believe, does not consist in its distinctive methodology but in its conception of reason and intelligence as embodied, situated and holistic, and as decidedly not reducible to rule-governed manipulations of symbolic representations. Neglect this vision of reason at your peril, as Baron-Cohen’s work vividly demonstrates. His superficial notion of intelligence vitiates both his central theses: that there is an ‘essential difference’ between men and women, and that autism is the product of ‘the extreme male brain’. Baron-Cohen’s major claims (stated, as we shall soon see, more carefully than he is wont to do) are these: 1. On average, men and women differ psychologically. Men have an advantage when it comes to systemizing, and women have an advantage at empathizing. 2. These differences are biological in origin, as is demonstrated by studies of neonates and correlations between psychological traits and fetal testosterone. 3. Systemizing and empathizing give rise to different kind of cognitive abilities. Men and women have different, but equally valuable, intellectual skills. Neither gender is more intelligent than the other.4. However, the male superiority at systemizing leads to male superiority in science and in innovation. 5. The psychological differences between men and women help explain the origins of autism. People with autism, who are primarily male, possess extreme male brains. Each of these claims is, at best, dubious as I shall now show in detail.