By experience, most people can notice that vision can play tricks on them. Submerging a straight stick into water will give the optical illusion that the stick becomes bent. Similarly, rail road tracks in the distance are seen to converge. We know that both of these are untrue, but our perception gives us this impression of reality. Thus our sense of sight is misleading in some way. One can argue that the stick is truly straight because once it is out of the water, it can be seen as straight. But how does one know whether it bends under the condition of being submerged in water? From this confusion, one becomes doubtful on the reliability of their sense of sight, and may use a different mode of perception. For example, one may feel the stick to be straight underwater by touching it. But this gives rise to the issue as to what justifies a mode of perception to give us truth more accurately than another. However, the sense of touch may be just as fallible as sight. For example, assume that a person’s left hand is very cold, and the right hand is extremely warm. If this individual puts both of his hands into the same bucket of water with the same temperature throughout the water, the cold hand will feel warm and the warm hand will feel cold. This creates conflict between the senses of touch. Thus, this other mode of perception cannot be trusted either. Since we are in doubt of our senses of both sight and touch for the previous example, we must use other ways of knowing. We may use reason to justify that the stick is straight both in and out of water. Descartes’ law, the law of refraction, must be used to draw a conclusion and support the sense of touch that the stick never bends. Thus when we are in doubt about the accuracy of our senses, it is difficult to trust them to give us truth.
Although we have seen that our senses may not be reliable during different circumstances, they are important to us when speaking of safety and danger. What one feels, the experience of emotion, is important to each individual. Emotion, the way of knowing, is interrelated with perception. For example, if I touch a working stove, I will feel pain and associate the emotion of fear when I see a working stove in the future, thus avoid touching it. Thus a posteriori knowledge, knowledge that is dependent on experience, has been acquired from both perception and emotion. However, combining emotion with perception may create error in the knowledge acquired and our understanding of reality. This may be the case when we use our experience to generalize on a situation, where it may be wrong. Thus our understanding of reality is restricted in this sense.
The interpretation of information gained by our perception of what appears to be real is influenced greatly by emotion. This is evident within the arts, including music, literature, and many other forms. For example, a painting is visually perceived by all, but due to its subjectivity and its openness to interpretation, each individual would interpret this piece of art differently. This is because they approach their interpretation using their emotional response that is created by their perception (selectivity). Thus because of this ‘selectivity’, where a person uses his own emotions to understand the painting, one questions whether our senses can really be trusted, even though different information is acquired by different people to give us the truth hidden behind the same artwork.
Sense perception is of great importance to several areas of knowledge such as the natural sciences. The scientific method of observation and experimentation, by testing a hypothesis, uses the different senses as it’s a significant way of knowing. This is because our senses are the basis for the testing and verification/falsification of proposed theories in science. However, reason is required to aid our senses. For example, as Newton had pondered on the forces of attraction, his visual perception of the earth and the moon had verified his reasoning of the gravitational attraction between bodies with mass. His senses alone aren’t sufficient enough to give the truth of the forces of attraction, but the combination with reason aids an individual in understanding reality. However, reason limits information about the external world as it influences the selective nature of our perception.
Our senses are very useful instruments. We tend to resort to using them when they are the only form of the ways of knowing available. In other words, when in doubt of reason, emotion or language, we are only left to trust our senses. For example, a person approaches a seat. Lying next to it is a paper reading “Wet Paint”. The person cannot ‘see’ if the seat is wet or not. The language of the sign indicates that the seat was wet at a time, but the person does not know how long ago this sign was posted. Thus the person can only trust his sense of touch by feeling whether the paint is wet or not. As the person is left in doubt of the language available, he has no choice but to trust in his senses to give him truth. This example indicates the limitations of using language, the way of knowing, to aid our senses, as it may be false. However, it may have been the case that the language was correct, and thus there was no need to trust in our senses. This shows how language can aid our senses to give us truth.
Our senses give us information of the external world. Since perception is a selective process, this information is not a mirror of reality. What constructs the selectivity of perception are all other ways of knowing. From this, our understanding of reality can therefore be distorted. Thus, our senses alone cannot be trusted to obtain truth. On the contrary, reason, emotion and language can all be used to aid our senses to give us truth. This is because all other ways of knowing help to understand reality, and using senses alone, no meaning can be made from reality. For example, as our sight is limited to the size of an object, we can’t trust it in identifying a type of micro organism with the naked eye. By using reason from the use of manmade instruments to aid our senses, truth can be acquired. Thus clearly, our senses are most definitely limited. However, we do trust our senses most of the time. This is because they are our most immediate way of knowing the world and perhaps because most of the time they seem to work. Furthermore, when in doubt of all other ways of knowing, we should trust our senses to give us truth as they are the only available form of the ways of knowing.
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