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Tok Sense Perception

Decent Essays

To what extent is sense perception a good foundation for reliable knowledge?

Sitting in this classroom today, I can see different things around me, smell different smells around the room, feel the keyboard underneath my fingertips, taste the apple I had during lunch and hear all the different sounds coming from all different people in the room. I can say I know this to be true because we perceive the world through our five senses: sight, sound, taste, touch and smell. Knowledge is what we learn, what we gain from our own experiences and what we understand from other people’s interpretations. Our senses provide us with a journey, which we are able to take or reject.

Trusting our senses comes so naturally that we don’t realize what …show more content…

Appearance and reality can be very tricky to distinguish. I remember asking myself last month when I was very happy, is this real, or is this what I want my life to be? Without knowing, without realizing we prove to ourselves what is real and what is not by using the tests truth. When I was told about this, I didn’t even know what the tests of truth were. The first one is confirmation by another sense, if something looks like an apple and tastes like an apple, then we would conclude that its an apple. The reason we would use this is if one of our sense are wrong, like for example dry ice, when you look at it is steamy so we would say that it is hot, but in fact if you touch it, it is cold.

The second test of truth is coherence. When you see something that doesn’t fit into what you expect from experience of the world then you are most probably mistaken. For example when I was a little kid I used to spin around in circles until I was dizzy, and when I stopped I used to see the world spin around me. Although when I was not dizzy I knew that, that wasn’t true. Finally the third test of truth is independent testimony, testimony of other people. For example when I have put my mom’s phone on the table and I have seen it there, and when my mom asks for it, and its not on the table I ask my brothers and sisters to prove that they saw it there as well and my mom is most

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