ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how recent work on affective, sensory, perceptual, and cognitive atypicalities in people with autism underscores forms of like-mindedness that are largely neglected in contemporary discussions of interpersonal understanding. Autists and non-autists may have sensory, perceptual, and movement differences that make for pervasive differences in their perspectives on and ways of being in both the physical and social world. It focuses on Stueber's and Goldman's accounts of empathy or simulation. The chapter investigates the possibility that there are greater limitations than many have realized for a non-autist understanding an autist. Interpersonal understanding admits of kinds, senses, levels, degrees, and stages. Like-mindedness plays a more explicit central role in simulation theory. For example, theory-theorists hypothesize that autists have a deficit in 'theory of mind'. Simulationists hypothesize that autists have impairments in pretense, imagination, imitation, and perspective-taking. Standard accounts of autism explain autists' difficulties in social interaction by attributing to autists deficiencies in social cognition.
