TOK Essay on How Reliable is our Idea of Anything?
This was an essay for my Theory of Knowledge (TOK) IB class. I think it's pretty good.
"Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects" – Charles Sanders Pierce. How reliable is our "idea of anything" according to this view?
Charles Sanders Pierce states that "Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects." In this paper, an attempt will be made to show the validity of this statement and to justify the exclusion of the imperceptible part of the outside world from our conception of it.
For our purposes, we will set a person's mind and ideas apart form everything that goes on in the real world around it. The two that we've just separated, can actually be argued to be within each other, but in this paper, they will be discussed separately, connected through our senses and actions. This is consistent to the current idea of how the brain is believed to work, and it does not have an effect on the result of this paper except in the radical case that one may believe all reality to be an illusion of the mind.
Within our current view, the outside world causes stimuli to our senses and these stimuli are transferred to our brain through an intricate network of nerves. Some stimuli invoke automated responses of which we may not even be aware, but others are combined with stimuli from our other senses to help form an idea, or an image in the brain. The brain processes the idea and responds in a pattern built through experience. Throughout this paper, we will mainly concentrate on the first part of this process, the reception of stimuli and the formation of ideas.
The only input to our brains are the signals from our senses. Groups and certain patterns of these signals are associated to real world objects or phenomena by experience. These associations are our ideas. When all or part of these signals are induced by stimuli, our brains call the appropriate idea. Given enough stimuli, we conclude the presence of the associated object or phenomenon.
Whatever properties or effects of an object we cannot sense, we cannot include in our idea of the object. For example, we do not have a direct sense of radio waves, so looking at a radio broadcast antenna, we can tell what it is but we cannot tell if it...