ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the compatibility between E-Cognition theories of mental health (E-Mental Health) and the Neurodiversity movement. E-Mental Health offers many valuable conceptual resources from a neurodiversity-affirming perspective. These include the critique of cognitivist idealizations of the normal mind as a naturally harmonious set of internal information-processing mechanics—which underlies both wrongful pathologizing and normalizing of cognitive divergence and disability—and the view of cognitive (dis)abilities as socio-culturally situated, challenging the supposed value-neutrality of mental categories. Despite these complementarities, however, many scholars remain problematically tied to normalcy assumptions that marginalize neurodivergent perspectives. This chapter takes that critique further: not only do some E-Mental Health perspectives de facto exclude cognitive divergence, but their underlying descriptivist conception of mental normativity may itself reinforce this exclusion, naturalizing neuronormative and ableist assumptions. Drawing on insights from early analytic philosophy, we argue for an expressivist account of mental interpretation as primarily evaluative. This, we argue, can help advance a more inclusive E-Mental Health in three key respects: by recognizing the intrinsically open nature of debates concerning mental norms and categories; by uplifting neurodivergents’ epistemic status in those debates; and by standing as a barrier against elite capture.
