CONCEPT
Hermeneutic Priority
The normative orientation that hermeneutic reading — critical evaluation of AI output — must take structural priority when stakes are high, because it is the mode that keeps embodiment, alterity, and background honest.
Hermeneutic priority is the Ihde volume's first normative orientation for responsible AI use. Among the four relational modes, only hermeneutics involves active critical evaluation of the technology's output. Embodiment's transparency conceals what the tool has changed. Alterity's openness suppresses the distance reading requires. Background's invisibility forecloses examination entirely. The hermeneutic mode is the corrective that reveals what the others naturalize. The orientation is not that hermeneutics must be continuous — such a demand would eliminate the flow states that make AI collaboration valuable — but that it must take structural priority: built into the workflow as a non-negotiable practice that interrupts the other modes periodically and systematically.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The orientation follows from the structural analysis of the four relations. If only hermeneutics provides the critical capacity that responsible use requires, and if the other three modes actively suppress that capacity through their respective experiential structures, then without deliberate hermeneutic intervention the builder becomes increasingly susceptible to