Choose two senses and explain how they have claims to knowledge.
TOK essay- sense perception.
“All our knowledge is the offspring of our perceptions.”
LEONARDO DA VINCI, Thoughts on Art and Life
There is only one aspect of life that all animals possess which enables them to acquire information about the outside world, even though the only ones capable of developing that information into knowledge are human beings, as we are the only living organisms with the ability to think and evaluate our situations; whereas other animals react by instinct or reflexes.
We all know our 5 senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell. As a knower, I can say that senses are the link between our body and the external world. They are the medium which we use in order to gain knowledge about what is happening outside us.
In this essay I am going to talk about 2 out of the 5 known senses: sight and hearing – for those we use the eyes and ears as sensory devices-.
As regards the sense of sight, many people claim that this is the most reliable sense of all. This is mainly because people believe that nothing can fool their sense of sight. If we see a car in front of us, we know that it is actually there. The same example can be applied to the slice of bread we might see in our daily breakfast. But how can we be sure that it is really there and that piece of bread is not just a mere image created by our own brain?, Taking into account that there is a really complex system going on inside our head since the outside stimulus is captured by the retina until a projection of what it is outside is reflected in our brain. The answer is that we cannot, but just a few people around the world accept this idea and they are sceptics. That’s the basic reason why most people just believe what they see and rely on their sense of sight. In that way, as we believe what we see, therefore we know it. In other words, we know what we see. We are constantly acquiring new information from the environment by watching thins happen outside us. For example, in Biology, the visual sense is one of the most important of all the 5 senses, as the basics of biology are mainly based on observation. If we take the example of the Ecology topic, what we do is to observe the living organisms and how they develop and react in their own ecosystem, and in order to do that, we must use our sense of sight; for example, watching how many species are there in a rainforest environment.
