When Should We Trust Our Senses To give us Truth

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The world is a big place, filled with people full of curiosity and with their own individual quests. People are constantly talking, looking, hearing, smelling, and gaining knowledge from things and people from their environment. The scope of knowledge gained on a day to day basis is therefore vast. To what extent though, is this knowledge we acquire true? People are constantly seeking for answers to their questions or solutions to their problems; in a way, they seek a pathway to truth. The quote: "rather than love, than money, than faith, than fame, than fairness... give me truth" (Thoreau) justifies that truth is a necessity of life and every man seeks it to distinguish between reality and fantasy. To understand truth, we need to know its three basic theories. The correspondence theory states that a statement is true if it corresponds to a fact. The Coherence theory says that a proposition is true if it fits in with our overall sets of belief. Finally, the pragmatic theory states that a proposition is true if it is useful or works in practice. We will use these three theories to understand when our senses can be trusted to give us the truth.

The human species are said to have the weakest of all senses in terms of potency because they can be easily deceived. Perception is a very sophisticated issue because not everything we perceive is real. Optical illusion for sight, not hearing low and high frequency sounds, knowing what a thing tastes like because of its label or the fact we know what it is, not being able to differentiate between different smells, and the reflex reaction for the sense of touch are vivid examples of how things we perceive through our senses sometimes differs from objective reality. We can simplify this by saying that senses just provide the raw information which is then processed through knowledge in the brain to give us a clear and bigger meaning of that information that we believe is true. Therefore, our senses themselves cannot be relied upon to give us the truth. Ultimately, we can never know the absolute truth but only get relatively close to it by combining our senses along with the ways of knowledge- this is the only time we should trust our senses to give us truth.
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Before getting into details of when we should trust our senses to give us truth, let us look at a classic example of Helen Heller. Even though she was not born blind and deaf, a disease led her to the pit of blackness at a very young age. She was the first deaf blind person to graduate from college. Sight and hearing are considered to be the most important of all senses because it is these that shed light on the outside world and help us stay in touch with our surroundings and communicate with the society around ...

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