Ian Heywood and Barry Sandywell (eds.). Interpreting Visual Culture. Explorations in the Hermeneutics of the Visual
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BOOK REVIEW
Ian Heywood and Barry Sandywell (eds.). Interpreting Visual Culture. Explorations in the Hermeneutics of the Visual Routledge: London and New York. 1999. 268 pages, ISBN 0-203-98459-5 Jan Kyrre Berg Friis1 Received: 16 July 2020 / Accepted: 16 August 2020 © Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2020
1 Introduction There is a whole new “hermeneutics of vision” impacting on how we are to understand what human visual perception is about. That hermeneutics is embedded into scientific practices was already addressed by Heelan (1972, 1983a, b), and later also by Ihde (1998) in his Expanding Hermeneutics. Heelan for instance argued that “Mind resides in the knowing subject, which is embodied in the instrument conjoined to the biological organism of the scientist” (497). This last aspect, argued by Heelan, is of interest because it has entered a more contemporary discussion that is not only about extended cognition, Heelan’s point is also embraced by views like those found in “embodied enactive cognition”, as presented in Gallagher and Allen (2018). Since we now are talking about embodiment, Ichiro Tsuda have even emphasized that the processes of the brain indeed work in hermeneutical ways, he writes “Hermeneutic process is a peculiar mechanism of information processing of the brain. Metaconsciousness explains the hermeneutic process. This existence of a hidden dynamics is of importance for man’s cognition” (Tsuda 1984: 241). Likewise, Érdi (1996) also states that the human brain is a hermeneutic device. And Marr (2001) held, as Heelan also did, that visual perception is a hermeneutic process. Visual perception, brain, and bodily processes come together in the hermeneutical cognitive act. Tsuda writes that recognizing patterns happens when the human brain process almost all patterns in parallel, simultaneously, and instantaneously, i.e. the human
* Jan Kyrre Berg Friis [email protected] 1
Section for Health Services Research, Department of Public Health, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
ability to identify a friend easily in a large crowd of people (Tsuda 1984: 242). Hence, following Heelan, Tsuda, Marr and Érdi, we could claim that the innate cognitive ability to create meaning of the world and its objects could perhaps be called a “deep hermeneutics.” It is perhaps a “naturalized hermeneutics”—not to be understood as a hidden practice of the natural sciences but more in the sense as a process within nature itself, within in the neural exchanges of the brain, and is as such bodily-neural embedded interpretative processes and is therefore hermeneutics. It is for sure the individual’s interpretative attuning to world and self and as far as neural processing go it is prior to consciousness and hence tacitly embedded in whatever we do. However, from a contemporary technological context we can clearly see a difference between the human mind—its neural-bodily exchanges, and the technological offshoot called AI, in that humans interpret the out
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