Deception Without Lying: A Case-Derived Two-Operation Hypothesis of Truthful Misdirection in Autistic Communication

Abstract

Can an autistic speaker deceive without lying? This paper reports a case in which individually defensible true propositions combine to produce an impression a listener could reasonably describe as deceptive, without the speaker asserting anything he believes false. Drawing on autobiographical case material, the paper proposes a two-operation hypothesis: an utterance is generated without antecedent deliberation, then subjected to a real-time evaluative judgment that determines whether its foreseeable misleading effect is corrected or permitted to stand. Deliberateness, on this account, belongs to the evaluative operation rather than to generation, distinguishing the mechanism from paltering, camouflaging, and double empathy accounts of autistic communication, each reviewed and differentiated directly. A psychoanalytic reading, informed by Brenner's modern conflict theory, frames the repertoire as a compromise formation between the demand to answer and the need for self-protection, and treats the speaker's own recognition of the pattern as potentially subject to resistance rather than as transparent introspective access. The paper is explicit about its evidential limits: the case is single, unreplicated, and retrospectively reconstructed, and the construct is offered as a falsifiable hypothesis, not an established mechanism, with specific predictions, response latency, corrective behavior, physiological profile, and post-interruption awareness, proposed for future dyadic testing. Clinical implications are framed narrowly, as a hypothesis available to interpretation rather than a basis for intervention, cautioning against reading topic-specific protective communication as evidence of relational deception.