Sense Perception When should we trust our senses?
Uploaded by sikayena26 on Dec 08, 2011
When should we trust our senses?
Sense perception is the active, selective and interpretive process of recording or becoming conscious of the external world. It is the channel of communication between the outside world and us. Therefore it is an important dimension of our understanding of the world. Much of what human beings acquire from the world around us is perceived by our senses; Sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. They receive and, together with rationality, inevitably process and interpret every bit of information. Hence, most of our perception of the ultimately unattainable reality depends crucially on the nature of our sense organs, since they are the ones that essentially provide a channel of communication between our insides and the world outside.
Common sense realism holds the philosophy that perception is a passive and relatively straightforward process of which results in an accurate picture of reality. Primarily, the world is how we see, hear, touch, smell and touch it, but perception is selective: we do not -and cannot- notice everything in a given environment. As human beings, we do not hear every existing sound nor do we see every light ray: if we did, our world would certainly be much noisier and perhaps much redder, since it would be in that way that we would perceive infrared rays. Thus, this essay will discuss how the five senses work and whether or not we should trust them to give us truth using these knowledge issues.
1. Is seeing believing?
2. How is truth defined, and how do we know whether what we perceive is the truth?
In person, I believe we should trust our senses to a certain extent. We trust our senses more than we realize. They keep us going smoothly, avoiding accidents, allowing us to navigate around each day, and keeping us alive. However, our perception is limited, therefore in situations that require intellect and reason, we shouldn’t just accept things as they are, but accept the possibility that whatever perception we may have may be wrong. Therefore, we cannot always trust our senses to give us truth.
Our senses work well to give us truth on simple tasks that do not require much work. In the morning after we wake up, most people take a shower. Senses easily play roles here; our sense of touch enables us to regulate the temperature of the shower to fit our preferences, we test the water usually...