Social cognition and autism spectrum disorders: From mindreading to narratives

Abstract

In this chapter I will work on the crucial role of semiotic narratives for social cognition. I will try to stress the key position that a semiotic theory of narrativity can occupy in explaining our capacity of attributing meaning to the others’ actions and understanding, through semiotic interactions analysis, social cognition’s impairments like Autism Spectrum Disorders in infants. I will be inspired by Shaun Gallagher and Daniel Hutto’s (2008) Narrative Practice Hypothesis (NPH) and I will try to develop the Narrative Practice Hypothesis using insights from the semio-tic tradition. Indeed, according to Hutto (2008, 2009), narratives are “representational artefacts”. However, a distinction between narratives and narrativity can be introduced and while narratives can be thought of as representational artefacts (Gallagher and Hutto 2019), semiotic narrativity cannot, since it is neither an artefact, and much less a representational one. In this chapter, I will outline what semiotic narrativity is and what its role can be for social cognition and Autism Spectrum Disorders.