Important concepts about theories

Far too much timewasting philoso-waffle has been written about theories, but I think that nevertheless there are a few points that are important to make clear. This article here is a work-in-progress. For now I'll just discuss a first aspect.

The illusion of conflicting of theories.

Consider the answer to the question "How did you manage to get from town A to town B in only 30 minutes?". One answer might be "I bought a bus ticket". Another answer could be "Oil was pumped up from the ground, taken to a refinery, the resulting diesel was then transported to a depot, and then pumped into the tank of a vehicle, ......" and so on.

Those two explanations of the journey look very different and yet they can both be true simultaneously. Likewise there are quite a number of ideas currently around concerning autism causation, some of which are even called theories of autism. And just because they look very different from the antiinnatia theory, it does not follow that they are all in conflict with the antiinnatia theory, any more than the bus ticket theory is in conflict with the oil fuel theory.

For instance my presentations of the antiinnatia theory had already incorporated the concept of theory of mind even before anyone else had published anything about that concept. From my perspective it was just some more of the innatons that get suppressed (or impaired) by antiinnatia.

Another instance is that some people are linking the male-female imbalance of autism cases to characteristics of testosterone (such as its potentiating the effect of mercury). My 1993 paper gave an explanation of why there was this imbalance, but in terms of natural selection. Again there is no necessary conflict here, any more than there is between the bus ticket and oil-production theories of my journey. Of the two, my natural selection explanation is the overarching one, as it additionally explains why testosterone would be the molecule it is (with that effect), or why testosterone was selected to be the masculinising hormone. The explanation in terms of chemical details meanwhile could have potential usefulness for diagnosis or intervention.