When should we trust our senses to give us truth?

International Baccalaureate Theory of Knowledge

TOK Essay

Title

When should we trust our senses to give us truth?

By

Viraj Patel IB 1B

Supervisor

Mr. Ombewa

Word count: 1,444

Senses are the means by which we receive information from the environment, this information is then interpreted in our brain, just the way a computer process raw data by interpreting the data and producing something meaningful to the user. Therefore the way the brain will interpret what an individual has received from his/her senses will affect his/her perception i.e. the way one interprets and organizes their sensations. This therefore affects an individual’s ability to obtain knowledge, as an individual’s emotions and reasoning become tainted by their perception of an issue and therefore their ability to seek truth because, knowledge was defined by Plato as “Justified true belief.” Therefore that belief must be true and has to be justified, for it to be considered knowledge, thus to obtain the truth we must justify our beliefs.

However this definition of knowledge seems to be ambiguous to me because there are certain knowledge claims that are considered as true by some and false by others, and yet to classify a claim as true or false an individual must have knowledge about the claim he/she makes before regarding it as true or false. A good example is the existence of the soul in human beings, the soul as defined in the 2004 Encarta encyclopedia is “The immaterial element that, together with the material body, constitutes the human individual.” The existence of souls is both believed and disregarded by people all over the world, some say they do believe in souls because of their religion, or because they have communicated with the souls of others they have known and yet at the same time other do not believe in souls as they feel there is no evidence to support the existence of souls. All the groups mentioned above have their beliefs on the issue of souls but it is impossible to tell which group’s belief is true, and therefore which group has knowledge of the existence of the soul is an unanswerable question.

Our ability to seek the truth depends on how we perceive our sensations and without perception the information that is obtained through our sensory organs is useless, the same way crude oil is only useful to us when it has been refined, and our perception is affected by a number of factors, therefore our ability to obtain the truth depends more on our perception then what our senses give us, because two people can be exposed to a similar experience but the knowledge they will obtain from the experience may be totally different from each other, due to their different ...

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Our ability to seek the truth depends on how we perceive our sensations and without perception the information that is obtained through our sensory organs is useless, the same way crude oil is only useful to us when it has been refined, and our perception is affected by a number of factors, therefore our ability to obtain the truth depends more on our perception then what our senses give us, because two people can be exposed to a similar experience but the knowledge they will obtain from the experience may be totally different from each other, due to their different perceptions from the experience. Our perceptions primarily affect our reasoning and if our perspective is not biased we use deductive logic to arrive at a conclusion and thus we end up obtaining knowledge.

A factor therefore that will affect our ability to obtain the truth is our bias. If a person is bias then their ability to seek the truth will be skewed in such a way that the person will not take in any new knowledge that contradicts with their existing opinion on a particular issue, even though the sensations he/she receives are indicative of knowledge that is contradicting to their existing knowledge, hence their perception is somehow controlled in such a way as to only obtain knowledge that is in line with or strengthens their views on an issue. However an individual with a bias on a particular issue may be compelled to obtain more knowledge on the issue at hand so as to strengthen their truth on the issue. But an individual with an unbiased mind will be able to gain more knowledge as they are more open to the different views regarding a knowledge issue.

Emotion can also affect the seeking of truth, because when we are emotional we tend to move away from making logical decisions and instead move to giving fallacies, regardless of what input our sense give us, therefore making it difficult to obtain the knowledge that is against one’s version of the truth. A good example of such a situation would be my love for the TV series “Nip Tuck” when I was in year 10; I loved everything about this series and would never skip an episode as I thought it the best thing I could possibly do with my time, and when “Nip Tuck” went off season I was devastated, as I matured, I figured out that my devastation was because of my lack of separation between the facts and my emotions, therefore my emotions lead me to a reasoning that I would not survive without the show, as David Hume perfectly puts it “Reason is a slave to emotion” . This affected my reasoning and therefore my ability to separate the truth from the false, that indeed I can live a normal life without “Nip Tuck”.

I also believe that our beliefs and traditions play an important part when it comes to seeking the truth. As a Hindu I have a belief in life after death and this belief has lead me to seek deeper knowledge on the issue so as to prove the truth about life after death maybe not to anybody else but to myself at least, thus my belief has lead me towards a personal truth and to seek knowledge so as to re-affirm my truth. Our traditions also affect our ability to gain the truth, take for example the issue of arranged marriages in the Indian society where two individuals who have never met before are married is a norm, but when seen by a person who comes from a society where they are free to choose whom they want to marry, they will have a perception that arranged marriages are a violation of the sovereignty of the individuals getting married. But for a person who has lived in an Indian village with no outsiders for his entire life, the arranged marriage is perfectly normal and they will not give a second thought when they are told about the violation of sovereignty because tradition has taught them that there is nothing wrong about arranged marriages, thus their sensations will give them a truth that is line with tradition, and this will make them unreceptive to new knowledge about arranged marriages unless they are willing to seek knowledge from other cultures.

The truth also changes when new knowledge comes forth. For example the constitution of the atom was thought to be like a “plum pudding” with positive and negative charges embedded in it by J.J Thompson, this was considered the truth about the atom till Geiger and Marsden’s experiment proved this to be false and the explanation of the results of this experiment by Danish scientist Henrik Bohr is the structure of the atom we know today. Therefore the truth is affected by new knowledge as time progresses.

In conclusion I would like to say that our senses play an important role in obtaining the truth because without our senses giving us the information we cannot gain any information which will give us knowledge as our brain primarily uses the senses to obtain information which it can process to knowledge. However the type and amount of knowledge that is received by our brain and whether we consider it to be true or false depends on our perception, emotions, reasoning and the way we analyze and use language. This implies that different people can have their own version of truth on a particular issue as the way they analyze the information from their senses if affected by a number of reasons which vary from one individual to another, of which I have mentioned a few above, these different reasons from my perspective are the ones that may lead us to obtain further knowledge so as to reinforce our version of the truth and in doing so will also give us a better understanding of other versions of truth and thus increasing our knowledge. However I also feel that as we develop our version of the truth we tend to shun away knowledge which disregards our truth, therefore our minds fail to obtain priceless information and knowledge whose use is unknown to us. Therefore when we are seeking the truth we must understand that it is not only our senses that give us truth but how we interpret these senses is what leads us to the truth, and thus we must be as objective as possible when we interpret our senses so as to obtain a truth which is free from any factor that will influence our gaining of knowledge and therefore our ability to get the truth, as far as we possibly can.

Acknowledgements

Mr. Ombewa’s and Mr. Ocharo’s class notes and discussions
2004 Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (www.iep.utm.edu)