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‘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

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‘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 The typical description of a nice day outside includes lush green grass and clear blue sky. Everyone can relate to it, we see the colour, we can smell the scents and we can feel the texture. Yet do we see colour and smell the scents? Or does colour and scent exist in the world and all we as humans do is simply comprehend them? Is the day really a nice day? Or are we just in a good mood resulting in the day being nice? Seeing and understanding things as they are, can be completely different according to the way we are. A chair for example when we look at it is brown, wooden and shiny. When we feel it, it is hard, …show more content…

Language is also affected as emotions change the ways we express ourselves e.g. we sometimes swear when we get angry. Emotions also tend to lead us to make irrational decisions. For example, a person sees the car that they’ve always wanted as they walk past a showroom. Within moments of seeing the car the person is so excited and filled with want that without thinking that day he buys the car. However, later on when the credit card bill comes and the person is unable to pay for the car and regrets his sudden decision to buy it. In this case his strong emotion of want overshadowed his reason and thinking, therefore causing him to make an irrational decision and suffer in the long run. Paradigms are the way we each individually hold our views of the world. They are ‘mental constructions’ [3] that we use to justify reason and channels how we think. For example two people are looking at the sky. One person sees beautiful extraordinary stars and expresses them as a natural phenomenon, yet the other sees ‘a celestial body of hot gases that radiates energy derived from thermonuclear reactions in the interior’[4]. This as an example of an everyday paradigm where two different paradigms are held by two different people. So we have our own personal paradigms, which include our own emotions and experience. As an individual I hold my own paradigms, however the way we see

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