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In this essay, I take up Patrick A. Heelan's proposal that visual perception is "hermeneutic."¹ For Heelan, visual perception is the capacity to "read" (select, abstract) the appropriate structures of the world and form perceptual judgments about which these structures "speak."² For example, visual space only has a Euclidean geometrical structure when the environment is filled with a repetitive pattern of regularly facetted objects that exhibit standard Euclidean shapes. Vernacular visual space in contrast is non-Euclidean, while a digital environment produces perception appropriate to the information age.³ Such structures — vernacular, Euclidean, digital — cannot be translated into one another. Heelan terms these structures "grammars"⁴ (which later I will take to be similar to, though not quite the same as, Wittgensteinian grammar(s)). Non-Euclidean grammar is used for local, vernacular Lifeworld spaces; Euclidean grammar for the space of classically measured physical entitities, and digital grammar of pixels, nanometers and space-time compressions for information processing.⁵ Euclidean perception resulted from the invention of technological "prostheses" or "readable technologies" which helped cope with changed circumstances, substituting for what inherited capacities did not supply. Digital perception destabilised and desubstantialised Euclidean perception to cope with the changed circumstances of the information age.⁶ Thus the red ochre of the landscape, the red of the Munsell colour chart, and the red of a computer screen's "contrast colour" belong to three different grammars: they are quite simply not the same "red."⁷

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-1767-0_26

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