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Introduction

When should we trust our senses to give us truth? Can We Trust Our Senses to Give Us The Truth? As humans we rely on our senses in order to effectively communicate with our environment. Exactly to what extent should we trust our senses to give us the truth? Our senses can be defined as a medium by which the body perceives an external stimulus. This includes sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch. The four ways of knowing which are logic, perception, emotion and language all play an important role, as our ideals and beliefs are formed when we take in information and our mind does its best to organize it so that it is understandable and identifiable. We must recognize that emotion is one way of knowing that is most deceptive when trying to find the truth, as it is basically our opinion of what we perceive, and not reality. Emotion is the one way of knowing that should not be used to find the truth. ...read more.

Middle

One could argue that I was now closer to the truth than I had been before. Through visual perception, I believe that it presents a greater dimension in understanding the appearance and nature of the onion. However, other people who performed the same experiment might be presented with a different description of the onion layer. The counter argument is that within the natural sciences (particularly biology) the structure of the subject acknowledges that our senses may distort the final results of experiments. A significant fact is the use of reading error to compensate in areas where our visual sensation is absent. Without the inclusion of reading error and uncertainty values where appropriate, the experiment is considered to be less accurate. An interesting concept to consider is that perhaps our senses are designed for survival purposes rather than having been developed to perceive the truth. This would prove compatible if we compare our senses with that of other living creatures. ...read more.

Conclusion

If you concentrate, you can observe your own on mind, your own thoughts. Is that the mind observing itself, or is there something beyond the mind? The reality outside of our minds is a possible definition of truth. Our senses provide the only link between our mind and reality. Although acceptable in some circumstances that we can always trust our senses to obtain the truth, perhaps an equally strong argument is that we shouldn't. Rather, the essence of truth originates from pure reason, which is deductive and logical. I would agree that we need both sense perception and reason to fully comprehend the true nature of things. I believe that our sensory perception is important in obtaining the truth although given the fact that we should be completely aware of the capabilities and limitations of our sensory organs. However, there are certain circumstances for which our interpretation of raw sensory data is inaccurate. Although we cannot always trust our senses to give us truth, sense perception is a medium for which we can conceive the true nature of things that are perceivable by us. ...read more.

This student written piece of work is one of many that can be found in our International Baccalaureate Theory of Knowledge section.