Abstract
The present volume brings together six contributions that pursue a common question: under which epistemic conditions forms of knowledge arise that do not primarily rely on representation, model construction, or symbolic abstraction, but instead emerge from a direct structural coupling between perception and world.
The point of departure is the observation that central areas of contemporary cognitive science—particularly intelligence research, autism research, and savant studies—continue to operate with the implicit assumption of a single, representational architecture of cognition. Within this framework, neurodivergent modes of perception and thought appear either as deficit profiles, as unusual performance distributions, or as isolated anomalies within an otherwise homogeneous cognitive system.
The contributions collected in this volume systematically question this presupposition. They develop the thesis that certain neurodivergent forms of perception and cognition—especially those associated with autistic modes of knowing—cannot be adequately described as variations within a unified cognitive architecture, but rather as expressions of an independent epistemic configuration. Autistic cognition is therefore not approached through deficits or performance measures, but through structural operators such as fidelity (high truth-resolution), hyperspecificity (context retention rather than generalization), pattern attunement (direct coupling to structural dynamics), and non-representational immediacy in world-relation.
Against this background, several interconnected theoretical shifts are proposed. First, the concept of intelligence itself is reconsidered. Intelligence no longer appears as the primary source of knowledge, but as a secondary stabilizing performance that becomes effective only once emergence has already occurred within a relation to the world. Second, savant phenomena are reinterpreted not as isolated “islands of ability,” but as local manifestations of a non-representational mode of knowing in which structural invariants can be directly recognized and maintained without symbolic mediation. Third, the concept of structural savantism is introduced to describe an epistemic configuration that remains largely invisible within both classical savant research and intelligence-centered models of autism.
A further focus of the volume concerns the methodological question of how such forms of knowledge can become scientifically accessible at all. In this context, the concept of synesthetic science is proposed as an epistemological extension in which embodied perception, affective resonance, and somatic feedback are not treated as disturbances but as epistemic instruments for detecting complex and non-linear relations in the world. From this perspective, neurodivergent perceptual configurations can function as measurement architectures capable of registering structural tensions and thresholds that remain invisible within strictly representational research paradigms.
The volume concludes with an analysis of the feature film Transferprotokoll as a transmedial research configuration. The film is not interpreted as an artistic representation of a theoretical approach, but as an empirical stress test of a non-representational knowledge architecture under real social and institutional conditions. Its polarized reception is therefore read less as an aesthetic judgement than as an epistemic marker indicating different degrees of compatibility between representation-oriented expectations and forms of knowledge that systematically resist narrative condensation and symbolic translation.
Taken together, the contributions aim to render visible the possibility of a plural architecture of human cognition. Instead of assuming a single universal model of knowledge, the volume advances a perspective of epistemic diversity in which different modes of world-relation coexist without being reducible to a shared representational logic. In this sense, the volume positions neurodivergent forms of perception and cognition not as marginal phenomena, but as constitutive expansions of the scientific horizon of knowledge.
Keywords
autistic epistemology, neurodivergent epistemology, autistic cognition, non-representational cognition, structural cognition, epistemic architectures, dual-architecture epistemology, neurodiversity and knowledge production, philosophy of mind and autism, cognitive pluralism, epistemic diversity, structural savantism, savant cognition, savant syndrome theory, veridical mapping, pattern attunement, hyperspecificity, fidelity in perception, high-resolution cognition, non-reductive perception, embodied cognition, enactivism and autism, predictive processing critique, representational cognition critique, structural perception, operatoric cognition, operator relativity, operator theory of cognition, emergence and cognition, complexity perception, epistemic injustice, structural epistemic injustice, neurodivergent perception, synesthetic science, embodied epistemology, non-representational knowledge, perception–world coupling, cognition beyond representation, autistic phenomenology, neurodivergent embodiment, epistemology of autism, plural architectures of cognition, cognitive science and neurodiversity, autism and philosophy of science, neurodivergent methods in research, artistic research and cognition, Transferprotokoll film analysis, transmedial research, epistemology of perception
Citation
Speed, Timothy. Autistic Epistemology & Structural Savantism (Studies in World-Formation, Vol. 9). Zenodo, 2026. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18998240.
Direct access to the full text: Speed_2026_World-Binding-Vol_9_en.pdf