Introduction

It is now widely acknowledged that a cognitive deficit underlies impairments in socialisation, communication and imagination in autism. Although many accounts of this cognitive deficit have been advanced, most clinicians and researchers have tended to coalesce behind one of three dominant theories in the field. These theories locate the core cognitive deficit of autism in an impaired theory of mind, in a cognitive processing style characterised by weak central coherence and in impairments of one or more cognitive processes referred to as executive functions. This multiplicity of cognitive deficits creates a primacy problem, in that only one of these impairments can be the core or primary deficit in autism while the others are secondary deficits. Deciding which, if any, of these impairments is more fundamental than the others is made all the more difficult by the fact that each cognitive deficit has received extensive experimental validation. Clearly, some non-empirical criterion needs to be found in order to address this question. In this chapter, I present pragmatic adequacy as just such a criterion. Motivated by the central role of pragmatic deficits in the communication impairment of autism, I argue that an acceptable cognitive theory of autism, particularly one that is foundational to other cognitive theories, must be pragmatically adequate. I assess the pragmatic adequacy of each of these cognitive theories in turn. It will be demonstrated that two of these theories – theory of mind and weak central coherence – can satisfy this criterion in principle.