2005 ) Social actions, gestalt coherence, and designations of disability: lessons from and about autism

This article has three main points: (1) “gestalt objects ” are not just perceptual chimera, but are a feature of everyday talk and social action; (2) a disability such as autism can be treated in terms of the intelligence it may gloss as comprising analyzable practices-in-interaction; and (3) the sociology of deviance and social problems can benefit from studies of the intrinsic orderliness of everyday talk and social interaction in both regular, or ordi-nary, and more specialized settings such as clinics. The data are two segments from a testing and diagnostic cen-ter for developmental disabilities in the United States. Each segment involves a child who is diagnosed with autism and is being administered a test that poses questions such as, “What do you do when you’re hungry?” The puzzle this test presents is to account for the patterns of both standard (commonsensical) and non-standard (autistic) answering. In accounting for patterns of answering, I use ordinary conversational instances of “what do you do when x happens? ” to reveal the logic required in the test, and to describe both commonsense and autistic intelligence. Interactionally, autistic answering may reverse a structural preference for gestalt or global interpretation of utterances in favor of stimulus-bound, local understandings. A major contribution of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to social science i