How Vision Metaphors Exclude the Blind

Writers often equate perfect vision with perfect understanding — they’re wrong

Credit: Eric Wiessner via Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0

Metaphors do not run cleanly through our language. They blur. In this series of essays, we’ve followed stories from the material histories of lenses in order to take apart the idea of “sight” as a metaphor for perception itself. We began by observing that the lens is a…