We See and Understand Things Not as They Are but as We Are." Discuss This Claim in Relation to at Least Two Ways of Knowing.

In life, what we perceive tends to show misconception in how the thought plays out. A good example would be the character Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s American classic: The Great Gatsby. Gatsby was unable to distinguish between his love for Daisy, a reality, versus the illusion that he could recapture her love by establishing and inventing a fraudulent past. He believed he could repeat the past, and acquire a flaunting wealth. In the novel, Jay Gatsby seems incompetent in establishing a difference between the realities of his life versus the illusion he made out.

“To be just is to be perceived”, or as Irish philosopher George Berkeley prefers to put it, “esse est percipi”. In this argument, Berkeley details extensively how material objects, as humans have come to know them, do not exist. Berkeley uses a series of premises to aid in the elimination of skepticism surrounding the existence of the world humans have come to know and grow fond of. At first read, Berkeley’s conclusion that the abstract ideas of substance, matter, or any physical objects simply are not real is very hard to grasp when humans have based their justifications on what is real versus not real on their own senses, and the validation of other people. However, Berkeley does an excellent job of making an argument one cannot refute.

Not everything we see is always as it appears to be. As we focus our attention and look a little more closely we find what is presented to us has deeper value than what the surface would have us think.

People try to understand the world through perception of experiences that they encounter. These encounters include either living through the experience first hand or the experience being conveyed by another person. Our perception weeds out main ideas from those experiences deeming them realistic and if so labels them truths. However, our perception of the obtained truth from those experiences is not always credible because as a recipient we are restricted to the amount of experience we can retain. Meaning the perceptions of the labeled truths is a result of our translation of incomplete experiences into new perception resulting from what he or she could retain from the original experience. Those incomplete experiences give rise to new

Do you ever wonder if there is more you could be doing for your schools? Is there more to just the normal classroom setup and curriculum? After recently reading the article “From Education” written by Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of America’s most influential thinkers and writers, I believe his definition of education should be implemented in our school district. He describes current education as militaristic and explains how he believes that learning should be “natural.” By “natural” he means learning through experience. The ideal education experience that Emerson presents is one where students are allowed to follow their interests and gain the information they desire most. Our school district should apply the “natural method” to all of our schools.

The human condition is as far from reason and judgement as anything can be, it is what we have tried to explain for centuries and it is still a confusing maze we attempt and pretend to understand. Holden from The Catcher in the Rye and Paul from Six degrees of

Every person, animal, object, etc. has a different perspective on life. We can never really compare our viewpoint on life to another person’s. We can’t compare our senses such as taste or sight to someone else’s. The only true experience you can have is your own. The only thing you’ve directly observed of the correlation between mind, behavior, anatomy, and physical circumstances is yourself. Since you can’t see into a person’s mind, their physical behavior could be constructed by purely physical causes. We are not able to appeal to the behavior of other people because that assumes that in them, outer behavior is connected with inner experience.

Humans are naturally curious creatures. One’s inquisitive mindset might lead to all sorts of discoveries or answers to cosmic questions. However, the world and the life one lives inside the world are not always as they seem to be at first glance. What one does know about the world is based solely on their perception of reality and one person’s perspective will differ from the next. How does one know when they look at the blue sky or the green grass that the other people around them are witnessing the same scene they are experiencing? Should the stranger on the street fear another stranger simply because they are unable to know for absolute certainty that other is not a deranged, cannibalistic murderer?

In this life, it is extremely important to always look at things from another person’s perspective. The reason for this is that though someone may know quite a bit about one subject, they might not be so well taught about another, and therefore, they have different opinions based upon their knowledge on the subject (whatever that subject may be) than someone who had studied that certain subject. Everyone has different beliefs, and it is important to respect that.

“Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” [1]

We are a society filled with naïve inductivists, we think the would is given to us, and that sight can explain everything. However, this is not the case, and in the article The Theory-Dependence of Observations by Chalmers you learn his theory on sight and how we may “see” the same thing but we see things differently. He proves this, by giving an example about a children’s puzzle picture. There are also three things he discusses of why all of us see thing differently from one another. Finally, the philosopher Nietzsche has similar ideas to what Chalmers believe but they are a bit different. Nietzsche focused more on language while Chalmers put a lot of his effects into sight, and how it could not explain and define everything, like we think.

I would like to explain this claim by using another example in another area of knowledge i.e. art. Take the example of Mona Lisa painting, some people find that she is actually looking at the viewer, some think that she is not looking at them, some find that she is crying in the painting and some picturize her as smiling. So all these viewers are right in their way, as we cannot blame anyone saying that no Mona Lisa is smiling or no Mona Lisa is crying or anything for that matter. This really depends on the perception, emotions and reasoning ability of the viewer. As, if the viewer, who is in a happy mood, may find her smiling and those viewers who are not in a good mood may find her crying. So it depends upon the state of mind of the person who is watching the painting at that time. In this situation reasoning is dominated by emotion.

There are four different sources of knowledge: perception, introspection, reason and memory. All our knowledge roots from our perception. Perception is the way humans sense the world outside the body. We perceive through our five senses: see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. Humans gain knowledge through experiences and experience through perception. Usually we can trust our senses to perceive our surroundings effectively but there are times we misperceive. Illusions, hallucinations or impediments of the accurate flow of information to our senses are examples of misperceptions. For example if someone hits their head causing their vision to blur or impedes them from effectively processing what occurring around them, then they shouldn’t trust their senses. Another example would be an anxiety attack causing a signal of threat to the brain also preventing the person from correctly processing their surroundings. If nothing can prove we are misperceiving then we have good reason to be believe our senses.

The production of knowledge is a process that occurs through a sequence of related actions, these series of actions allows for the Ways of Knowing to interact in a way that works to develop the knowledge that is being produced. From the prescribed title we can claim that while the Ways of Knowing may appear to be acting in isolation when forming knowledge, they are actually working in a variety of different ways in the construction and formation. In some cases, the Ways of Knowing are interacting so closely together that it is often hard to differentiate between them, for example emotion and reason, or imagination and memory. Given the right circumstances faith can be isolated to a point where it can be acting by itself to produce knowledge. However, this knowledge is often deemed as unreliable, due to faith being seen as one of the more “subjective” ways of knowing. This inability to differentiate the ways of knowing from each other during the production of knowledge, raises the questions “Can any knowledge in any Area of Knowledge be produced by a single Way of Knowing?” and “Is it possible to distinguish between Ways of Knowing if they are working together?”. While reason is used in almost all production of knowledge, it is the other Ways of Knowing used that can determine whether the knowledge is reliable or not, as some Ways of Knowing are more subjective than others. This essay will attempt to

The development of a person is complex and occurs on many levels. Although developmental models differ, they all tend to suggest that development has the following characteristics (Neukrug, 2017, 2013):