What do we really see?

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Nardeen Grace

Ms. Fleming

TOK

1/25/12

What do we really see?

 “We see and understand things not as they are but as we are “this claim can be valid to two very important ways of knowing reasoning and perception. I consider these as our main gates to knowing and revealing new information. We use these two ways of knowing which are in a way very related to each other because as we perceive things with our senses we reason it afterwards in our heads, but we are very different from each other and so what we perceive as in feel ,see , touch and hear varies from one person to another according to his genetic features and then again if we see the exact same thing we tend to reason it or see it differently in our own minds according to our personality and our past experience, making what we see and reason according to our own self and not according to what it really is or what it is to other people.

                Perception is defined in the Cambridge dictionary as an awareness of things through the physical senses specially sight, so it might seem as something absolute but we all have limitations in our perception and might even literally see things different from each other. As for reasoning it is defined as trying to understand and to make judgments on practical facts , but then again do we all have the same understanding and judgment on things we perceive?. These two ways of knowing are applied in our everyday life and two important areas of knowledge science and art. A big part of discovering Science is by experimenting on different things in which observation and conclusions which are depended on our perception and reasoning determines the scientific discovery within that experiment. Sciences tend to really show our limitations within our sense perception for example when seeing the sunlight we see a white light when it is actually the 7 colors of the spectrum this shows that we see according to our own perception which tends to be limited, also when viewing cells we can’t see the details with our own naked eyes, so to us it may appear as just an empty box or circle when there could be so much details when viewed under a microscope. Coming to the fact that we might even see things differently that each other could be illustrated by comparing a normal sight person to someone who is color blind, to him the world is a totally different perspective than the normal sighted person and is just shades of grey while to a normal person the world is such a beautiful place filled with color and emotions. In this case what we literally see is different from each other therefore we create with what we are or what we sense perceives totally different worlds from each other or in other words a different paradigm. Going back to scientific experiments he would have a totally different observation and even different conclusions especially in the field of chemistry in which a certain color might code for a certain element or chemical.

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                 The concluding part of the experiment is dependent on the reasoning of the person by evaluating the observation and what it really means scientifically. In science we tend to use inductive reasoning meaning that we base a specific idea on the general. For example when an experiment is made on a plant and the result shows that it undergoes photosynthesis then we reason that all plants undergo photosynthesis. People tend to differ in their reasoning, one of the reasons is that we may see different things due to our perception limitations and the other is that although we might ...

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