Toward a Common World, Toward a Common Sense. Perceptions, Interactions, Objects, and Environments in Autistic Experience: A Cognitive Semiotics Perspective

This essay advances a cognitive semiotics account of autistic experience, specifically focusing on the nature and function of rhythm for both explanatory analysis and normative intervention. Integrating Piaget’s genetic epistemology, infant research’s perspectives on primary interactions, and Trevarthen’s theory of communicative musicality within an enactive and extended framework of cognition, the study conceptualizes rhythm as the emergent property of attunement – that is, the organism’s continuous coordination of internal and external rhythms through sensorimotor patterns and intentional actions. In this perspective, autistic semiosis is not reduced to deficits in communication or social cognition, instead constituting a distinct mode of sense-making, governed by alternative semiotic logics. By focusing on the role of the predictive and anticipatory dynamics governing the perception-action cycles, the difficulties in rhythmic attunement of autistic persons are understood as arising not only from individual traits but also from the praxeological and material properties of environments that are typically constructed without regard to autistic aesthesic, perceptual, and cognitive sensitivities. Autistic behaviors such as repetition, stereotypies and inflexible routines are thus reinterpreted as strategies aimed at restoring experiential coherence in contexts that fail to support autistic modes of engagement. On this basis, the paper advances a normative claim: therapeutic practices and inclusive designs can foster environments functioning as semiotic niches for autistic sense-making. By aligning material affordances and interactional dynamics with autistic perceptual logics, such environments promote rhythmic synchronization, thereby enabling the emergence of a common world shared by both autistic and neurotypical people. In conclusion, rhythm is proposed as a conceptual and practical bridge. At the explanatory level, it illuminates the relation between attunement, perception, and autistic semiosis. At the normative level, it provides a framework for constructing inclusive environments capable of sustaining diverse forms of embodied cognition, enabling autistic and neurotypical individuals to inhabit a genuinely common world.