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Tok: Advantages and Disadvantages of Sense Perception as a Way of Knowing?

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What are the advantages and disadvantages of Sense Perception as a Way of Knowing?
What is Sense Perception? Sense Perception is our primary Way of Knowing. It includes all our 5 senses- sight, smell, touch and taste. It is the reason we are what we are today as the human race, the most advanced species on this Earth. It is our basic point of entry into this world. For example, as a child we see people walk and the way they walk and without reasoning it out we learn how to walk, or sitting on a chair, we don’t ask why he or she is sitting on the chair we just know that a chair is meant to be sat on. This is why I say it is our ‘primary’ Way of Knowing, and then comes reason, emotion and language. Even though there are several advantages …show more content…

Therefore, how reliable is Sense Perception on its own? Not very. In fact it can be deceiving on its own.
Sense Perception is a very superficial Way of Knowing. And ipso facto it can lead us to many truths but all very superficial in nature. For example, when we see a table a dog, we know it’s a dog because we’ve taught about it or read it in books when we were a child; the truth is it’s just a dog. Now take for example a sick dog, Sense Perception alone cannot lead us to the fact that it is sick, we see certain symptoms which can tell us if it is sick or not, for example if it is lying in a certain way we reason it out as to why it is lying in that particular way, is it normal or abnormal? Therefore the truth that Sense Perception alone could tell us was just the superficial truth.
Sense Perception is often intercepted by our other Ways of Knowing – Reason, Emotion and Language. We watched a video in class about eye-witnesses and how they detect the culprit among all the suspects. This was a very fascinating video about a woman who was raped by an African-American and while she was being raped she managed to get a very good look at the persons face. After surviving the horrendous crime, after a while she was called in to look at a series of pictures of suspects, she identified a picture as the culprit. Then later she

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