Summary
The most important advances in understanding neurodivergence have not come from better measurement. They have come from better questions. Someone refused to accept what the established framework said autism was, asked what it actually is, and followed the answer wherever it led.
This is Socratic method applied to a scientific field. Not as a pedagogical technique or a debate trick, but as an epistemological stance: the commitment to examining what you think you know, finding the unexamined assumptions that hold your knowledge in place, and being willing to discard the framework when the assumptions fail.
The deficit model of autism survived for decades not because the evidence supported it uncritically, but because the questions being asked presupposed it. If you start from “autism is a social communication deficit,” every study you design will measure social communication against a neurotypical benchmark, and every result will confirm the deficit. The framework generates its own evidence. It took a different kind of question to break the loop: what do we actually mean by deficit? Deficit relative to whom?
This page argues that Socratic inquiry is not merely a useful analogy for what happened in autism research. It is the best description of the epistemological method that produced the field’s paradigm shift, and it offers a framework for continuing it.
The unexamined framework
For most of its history, autism research operated within what Thomas Kuhn called “normal science”: work conducted inside an accepted paradigm, refining and extending established assumptions rather than questioning them. Pellicano and den Houting (2022) examined this explicitly, arguing in a major review that the conventional medical paradigm had produced three systematic distortions: an overfocus on deficits, an emphasis on the individual rather than their context, and a narrowness of perspective that excluded autistic voices from the research process.
These are not incidental flaws. They are what happens when a paradigm’s foundational assumptions go unexamined. Define autism as a deficit and research will measure deficits. Make the individual the unit of analysis and the environment escapes scrutiny. Treat the people being studied as objects rather than knowers and the knowledge produced will reflect the observer’s umwelt, not the subject’s.
Socrates would have recognised the problem. His method targeted exactly this: the confident assertion that conceals an unexamined premise. When Euthyphro claimed to know what piety is, Socrates did not dispute piety’s existence. He asked what it is. The answer fell apart under examination, not because Euthyphro was stupid, but because his certainty was built on assumptions he had never been required to articulate.
The deficit model of autism was Euthyphro’s piety. Clinicians and researchers were certain they knew what autism was. Socratic questioning revealed that what they actually knew was how autism appeared when measured against neurotypical norms, which is a different thing entirely.
Three Socratic turns
The paradigm shift in autism research can be traced through a series of moments where someone asked a Socratic question, one that examined the thing itself rather than accepting the received account. Three are particularly clear.
Milton and the double empathy problem
In 2012, Damian Milton published a paper whose title was itself a Socratic move: “On the ontological status of autism.” Not “on the causes of autism” or “on the treatment of autism,” but on what autism is. The paper examined the dominant theory of mind account (autistic people lack the ability to understand others’ mental states) and asked a question that should have been obvious: has anyone checked whether the difficulty runs both ways?
The existing research had not checked, because the framing made the question invisible. If autism is a deficit in the autistic person, then the communication breakdown is located in the autistic person. You do not test the neurotypical person’s ability to read the autistic person, because the framework has already told you where the problem is.
Milton’s question, is the empathy gap bidirectional?, was not technically difficult. It did not require new technology or methods. It required the willingness to question a premise that everyone in the field had accepted without examination. The double empathy problem (see The double empathy problem) reframed autism’s social difficulties as a mismatch between neurotypes rather than a deficit in one of them. The empirical evidence, when someone finally ran the experiments, confirmed it (Crompton et al. 2020, 2025).
That is elenchus. Cross-examine the confident claim. Find the hidden assumption. Show that the evidence, honestly examined, does not support the conclusion that everyone thought it supported.
Murray and monotropism
Dinah Murray’s route to monotropism followed a similar Socratic pattern, though she might not have described it that way. The prevailing account of autistic cognition emphasised deficits in executive function, theory of mind, and central coherence: three separate deficit theories explaining three separate sets of autistic behaviours. Murray asked a different starting question: what if the attention system works differently, and everything else follows from that?
Murray was seeking the essential nature of a thing. Instead of cataloguing symptoms and proposing a deficit for each one, she asked what unifying principle could account for the whole profile. Monotropism, the tendency to allocate attention in fewer, more intense channels, offered an explanation that was parsimonious, autistic-generated, and consistent with what autistic people actually report about their own experience (see Monotropism).
The existing deficit theories were not wrong about the phenomena they described. Autistic people do find task-switching difficult. They do process social information differently. They do attend to local detail over global pattern. But the explanation, that each of these is a separate malfunction, was wrong in the same way that Euthyphro’s account of piety was wrong: it described observable surface features without grasping the underlying structure.
Chapman and the good human life
Robert Chapman’s philosophical work (with Havi Carel, 2022) applied epistemic justice theory to neurodivergence and uncovered a Socratic problem at the heart of how autism research conceives of wellbeing. The dominant framing assumes that autistic people have poor quality of life. When autistic people report that they are, in fact, living well, the framework cannot accommodate the testimony. Chapman and Carel documented the resulting catch-22: a person is seen as autistic or as thriving, but rarely both.
The Socratic question here is: what do we mean by a good human life, and who decided? If the definition of flourishing is built on neurotypical norms (sociability, independence, career progression, emotional expression that follows particular conventions), then autistic flourishing becomes invisible by definition. Not because autistic people are not flourishing, but because their flourishing takes forms the framework cannot recognise.
This is hermeneutical injustice in Fricker’s (2007) terms: the shared conceptual resources of a community are structured in a way that makes certain experiences unintelligible. The late-diagnosed woman who spent decades unable to explain why she found the world so exhausting suffered hermeneutical injustice: the concepts she needed to understand her own experience did not exist in the frameworks available to her (see Late diagnosis). Chapman’s contribution was to show that the same injustice operates at the level of the research itself, not just the individual.
What makes Socratic inquiry different
Other philosophical traditions could claim relevance to the neurodiversity shift. Critical theory, phenomenology, and post-structuralism each offer tools for questioning dominant frameworks. What makes Socratic inquiry specifically apt?
It starts with what is this thing?, not with what is wrong with it, what causes it, or what to do about it. The first question determines everything that follows. If you begin by asking what is wrong with autistic people, you will find deficits. If you begin by asking what autism is (what kind of cognitive architecture, what kind of sensory relationship with the world, what kind of attention system), you arrive somewhere different. The evolutionary origins of neurodivergence (see Evolutionary origins of neurodivergence) became a question worth asking only after someone refused the deficit premise. If autism is a disorder, you do not ask why natural selection preserved it. If autism is a cognitive architecture, you do.
It also treats the person with the experience as a primary source of knowledge. Socrates talked to people. He did not study them from a distance and theorise about their internal states. The shift toward participatory autism research, toward “nothing about us without us,” toward treating autistic testimony as evidence rather than subjective noise: this is Socratic in spirit. The person who has the experience is the one who knows something about it. Ignoring their testimony in favour of external observation is the epistemic equivalent of what Socrates identified in his interlocutors: preferring the comfortable received account to the inconvenient firsthand report.
And it is comfortable with not knowing. Socratic inquiry often ends in aporia, the honest recognition that the question has not been answered, that the confident claims have been dismantled but nothing certain has replaced them. This sits uneasily in a medical field that wants diagnoses, treatments, and outcome measures. But it is honest. The current state of autism knowledge is aporetic in places: we know the deficit model is inadequate, we know the neurodiversity paradigm captures something real, and we do not yet have a unified theoretical framework that accounts for all of it. Pretending otherwise is the opposite of Socratic.
The evolutionary question
If you want to know what neurodivergence is, one of the most revealing places to look is its evolutionary history. Genetics, evolutionary theory, and evolutionary anthropology each offer a way of asking the Socratic question at a different timescale: not “why is this person different?” but “why does this kind of nervous system exist at all?”
The deficit model never generates this question. If autism is a malfunction, its persistence in the gene pool is a puzzle to be explained away (de novo mutations, assortative mating, genetic drift). But if you refuse the deficit premise and ask what autism is before deciding what is wrong with it, the evolutionary question becomes not just answerable but obvious. Neurodivergent cognitive architectures, including the heightened sensory fidelity, the deep systematic focus, the altered social processing, persist because they have been useful. Not useful in every context, not useful to every individual, but useful enough, across enough of human evolutionary history, to be actively maintained by selection rather than eliminated by it.
The evidence is accumulating. Genetic variants associated with autism are enriched in archaic human DNA, including Neanderthal sequences that have been carried in the human gene pool for tens of thousands of years. ADHD-associated variants show signatures of positive selection. The neural architectures that produce neurodivergent cognition are not recent errors; they are old solutions, shaped by evolutionary pressures that predate agriculture, cities, and the social norms against which they are now measured (see Evolutionary origins of neurodivergence for the full treatment).
This is Socratic inquiry applied to deep time. Ask what a thing is. Follow the answer past the clinical literature, past the diagnostic manuals, past the twentieth century, into the evolutionary record. What you find there changes everything about how you understand the thing you started with.
Socratic method and this wiki
This wiki is, in a sense, a Socratic project. Its method is to ask what things are before accepting what systems say about them.
The starting question was not “how do we treat autism?” but “what is sensory processing, and what happens when it works differently?” That question led to the Dutch prikkelbalans framework, to predictive processing, to the interaction between sensory load and executive function, to the evolutionary persistence of neurodivergent traits, to the double empathy problem, to monotropism, to the lived experience of late-diagnosed adults. None of these destinations were planned at the outset. They followed from the inquiry.
The wiki’s editorial stance (neurodiversity-affirming, evidence-transparent, honest about uncertainty) is a Socratic stance. It refuses to accept claims on authority alone. It insists on examining the evidence beneath the claim. It is willing to say “we do not know” rather than papering over gaps with confident assertions. And it treats the testimony of neurodivergent people as evidence, not as anecdote to be explained away by neurotypical theory.
This is not a retrospective rationalisation. It is a description of what actually happens when you commit to asking what a thing is rather than what you have been told it is. The inquiry leads where it leads. The questions generate the content. The method is the message.
Open questions
Can Socratic inquiry operate at scale in a research field, or is it inherently a practice of individuals and small communities? The paradigm shift in autism research was driven by a relatively small number of thinkers (Milton, Murray, Chapman, Pellicano, den Houting, and the autistic self-advocacy community) working against a much larger institutional apparatus. Kuhn’s model suggests that paradigm shifts happen when anomalies accumulate to the point where “normal science” can no longer contain them. But someone has to notice the anomalies, and noticing requires the Socratic disposition: the willingness to take a discrepancy seriously rather than explaining it away.
How does Socratic inquiry relate to autistic cognition itself? There is something suggestive in the overlap between Socratic method (persistent questioning, refusal to accept social convention as evidence, discomfort with vague answers, insistence on precision) and commonly described autistic cognitive traits. Whether this connection is substantive or merely metaphorical is an open question, but it is worth asking. If the mind that produced the elenchus processed social interaction through logic rather than convention (see Diagnosing the dead), then Socratic method may not just be useful for understanding neurodivergence. It may, in some sense, be neurodivergent.
Key sources
- Chapman, R. and Carel, H. (2022). Neurodiversity, epistemic injustice, and the good human life. Journal of Social Philosophy, 53(4), 614–631. doi: 10.1111/josp.12456
- Chapman, R. (2023). Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism. London: Pluto Press.
- Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Kadodia, Z. and Krueger, J. (2026). Epistemic injustice, niche construction, and neurodiversity. Philosophical Psychology. doi: 10.1080/09515089.2026.2657453
- Kuhn, T. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Milton, D. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: the ‘double empathy problem.’ Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887. doi: 10.1080/09687599.2012.710008
- Murray, D., Lesser, M., and Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156. doi: 10.1177/1362361305051398
- Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? The Philosophical Review, 83(4), 435–450.
- Pellicano, E. and den Houting, J. (2022). Annual research review: shifting from ‘normal science’ to neurodiversity in autism science. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 63(4), 381–396. doi: 10.1111/jcpp.13534