Shahed Al-Sharifi

TOK

Sense perception

Year 11

Shahed Al-Sharifi

  • What is the role of culture and language in the perceptual process? Do people with different cultural or linguistic backgrounds live, in some sense, in different worlds?

Two of the most important aspects of perceptual process are how the culture and language play a role on a person can completely affect their entire life, in which how they view the world. For example a person who has been brought up by the Hindi language/culture will recognize the world by their cultural point of view and have a different manner of communicating which can lead them to having their own cultural community and background, which would isolate them from all other cultures.  

Language causes a person to translate words into their own sense. It can have many different translations in other languages or it can only be a one word translation. For example the Pepsi-cola campaign that was released in Taiwan translated “come alive with Pepsi” in Chinese whether in English it translated “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead!” This signifies that language can make a person understand terms from a different approach, which can change the whole meaning of a statement on different sides.

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Culture can influence a person to behave and examine the world in a whole different level. It affects the perceptual process entirely.  The culture is used as an example of an egg, in other words, you must first learn to break the shell before eating the inside. This simply means to understand the language you must first learn the culture and its background. Cultures can provide you with a different teaching method to others, for example the middle-eastern people would teach their children sexual education at a marriage age, whether those of the western countries would teach their children at ...

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