Conative hormophoria: A dynamical-regime hypothesis for intra-spectrum differentiation in autism

Abstract

The 2013 removal of Asperger’s syndrome from DSM-5 was defended on evidential grounds that were, at the level of measurement, sound: inter-rater reliability for the distinction was poor, and symptom distributions across the autism spectrum are continuous. From these findings the field drew a further conclusion, that no distinct kind existed to be named. This paper examines the step from the first claim to the second and argues that it does not follow. The inference requires an unstated identity criterion, namely that a psychiatric kind, if real, must appear as a bounded region in a space of additive symptom coordinates. That criterion is not entailed by the data; it is a methodological commitment, and it is demonstrably inadequate to systems whose identity is carried by the structure of their dynamics rather than by the values of their variables at a moment. The paper does not claim that questions posed in symptom space are meaningless, they are intelligible and have answers, and the continuity findings are those answers. It claims something narrower and defensible: that a negative answer at the symptom level licenses no conclusion at the dynamical level. On that basis I propose a candidate intraspectrum kind, named here conative hormophoria, specified not by symptom counts but by a fourfamily dynamical fingerprint (long-range temporal correlations, functional excitation–inhibition ratio, neuronal avalanche statistics, and the dynamics of metastable connectivity). The construct is advanced as a hypothesis, not a finding, and is deliberately constructed to be orthogonal to ability level and support needs, a stipulation that makes it refutable in a specific and consequential way.