We can trust our senses to give truth when they cohere with what is already known, in other words, preconceived notions. For example in Psychology, a social science, a psychologist may have a female patient who is being abused, one day she might come in for a session with bruises on her body. With the pre-gained knowledge of her abuse, the psychologist might correctly assume that the bruises on her body originated from a beating. However, the same could be said when truthfully, the bruises could have been self-inflicted. Thus the preconceived notion about her has colored the psychologist’s perception of the bruises on her body. Because of this, perception of our sensory information cannot be considered as infallible as it can never guarantee absolute ‘truth’ or certainty especially with the different perceptions of different people at all times. Thus, as seen here we cannot trust our senses to give us the truth when we allow preconceived notions to affect our perception of certain facts.
We can trust our senses when our facts correspond with others, for example in history, when the facts of historians corroborate with the facts of other historians, we can safely assume that those facts are ‘true’. They gain such facts because, for example, they have lived through the event and have thus perceived these facts through their senses. However, a vital element in the process of perception is interpretation; humans inevitably interpret the information we gain from our sense organs. Moreover, these interpretations are inevitably flavored by the biases, values and preconceived notions of the historian and as a result, certain facts may not necessarily be the whole truth. This will undoubtedly affect our reading of historical knowledge, the intention of history being a thoroughly objective study of our past, and thus a line between opinion and fact must exist. However, as we study history, we cannot help but be influenced by our opinions and backgrounds on our interpretations of those readings that would have been influenced by the historian’s own preconceived notions and biases. Thus it can be seen from above that our senses cannot be fully trusted to give us the truth when we allow preconceived notions to color our perceptions of our sensory inputs.
Moreover, we should not trust our senses to give us truth if our perception of sensory information is false. As human beings, we obtain data-based perceptions through our senses, and one way for us to gain ‘truth’ is to process or interpret these perceptions. And thus our conclusion stemming from the processing of these perceptions results in our belief of the truth. However, if our perceptions of our sensory inputs are false then it can never be called ‘truth’. An Ancient Greek philosopher, Socrates, believed that humans could never learn the truth or reality of anything if we wholeheartedly continue to rely on our senses to gain the truth of our reality. One example he gave was submerging a stick halfway into water. If a straight stick is placed halfway in water, to the human eye, it looks bent. And because of our perception of this sensory information, we believe the truth is that the stick is bent when placed in water. However, once the stick is taken out of the water, it is straight again. So as humans we question which one is the ‘true’ shape of the stick, is it bent or straight, and if what we are seeing is the truth? Now, through the use of Science, we know the explanation for this phenomenon, the ‘bent’ shape of the stick is caused because of a decrease in the speed of light that travels in water which misleads our eyes, in other words, our senses. Thus, we see a problem here between two ways of knowing through our perception telling us one ‘truth’ (the stick is bent) and reason telling us another (the stick is straight). Now if we were to solely rely on our perception of the information obtained by our senses, we would believe ‘the stick is bent’ to be true. However, it is shown through the use of Science that this particular ‘truth’ is not true at all and thus, we cannot completely trust our senses to give us truth if our perception of sensory information is false.
As seen above, we cannot allow our senses to give us truth when preconceived notions color our perceptions and when our perception is false, this can be seen in Biology. Although all our 5 senses help us to construct our individual realities or truths, the sense of sight is above the rest because of its ability to create lasting and strong beliefs. Sight actually dominates the way humans perceive the world. The phrase “seeing is believing” indicates that the sense of sight is used to obtain evidence to determine what is to be believed, or what is the truth. This is knowledge as experienced first-hand, which is defined as knowledge by acquaintance by Bertrand Russell. This can be seen in the natural sciences where scientists make observations in order to explain a phenomenon, in other words, to determine the truth because our senses are what enables us to gain information which helps us to explain how the world functions. Again, our senses because of perception may give us the wrong information and thus senses cannot be fully trusted because perceptions do color our senses. In biology, scientists rely heavily on sight in order to find evidence on what is to be believed. For example, scientists will look through a microscope in order to view a plasmolysed cell. The scientist knows it is a plasmolysed cell because of a certain way the cell looks like through the microscope. The scientist then believes it is a plasmolysed cell purely based on sight and perception and then deducing that because the cell looks a certain way, it is plasmolysed. Therefore, through the sense of sight, external information has been received and then transformed into a truth through the scientist’s perception. However, the scientist has no way of knowing that they are truthfully seeing what they perceive. They could be seeing something different, a mutated cell or even something that is not a cell. In this case, the scientist is allowing previously acquired notions to influence what he is seeing. Although the process being observed may not be plasmolysis, the scientist sees plasmolysis because he or she believes it to be so, and thus believes it to be the truth.
As seen above, we cannot trust our senses to give us the truth all the time because of the unreliability of perception and preconceived notions affecting our perceptions. Although certain truths can be obtained when we can corroborate our information with others and when they cohere with what is known, they are not necessarily the whole ‘truth’ and may not apply in all cases. I believe that our senses are the foundation for us to begin to embark on our search for the ‘truth’; they should never be the deciding factor of ‘truth’.
Bibliography:
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