Which of our faculties do you think is more reliable - reason or perception? Give reasons. There are four ways of knowing. Reason is the way we obtain knowledge by means of our justifications and perception is the way we obtain knowledge by means of our experiences. People take different views on which one of our faculties is more reliable between reason and perception. As far as I am concerned, I would like to prefer reason tend to be more trustworthy. Two thirds of what we see is behind our eyes but perceptual illusions always exist in our life. And reason seems to give us certainty of judgment. The way we see something depends partly on the context in which we see it while sometimes the truth is hid by the visual …show more content…
Perception is unreliable as we are not always having a normal attitude when we try to know about something or have to make a judgment. In contrast, reason can help us to detect the truth clearly. According to Sherlock Holmes, who prided himself on having made the ‘faculties of deduction and logical synthesis’ his ‘special province’. In one mystery concerning the theft of and expensive race horse, a police officer asks Holmes if any aspect of the crime strikes him as significant. The solution to this crime hinges on the fact that the watchdog guarding the horse did not bark in the night, and from this Holmes deduces that the thief must have been known to the dog. Formally, we can lay out Holmes’ reasoning process as follows:
Watchdogs bark at strangers.
It did not bark at the thief.
Therefore the thief was not a stranger.
In this case, how can we use perception to judge any truth? Well, we may not have Homes’ power of deduction, we are constantly using reason to go beyond the immediate evidence of our senses. This means that perception is not enough as our senses can all too easily mislead us. As La Rochefoucauld said, ‘The head is always fooled by the heart.’ All in all, reason is a safe faculty than perception. Sometimes we may mislead by perception unintentionally. And in contrast, reason is able to give us more certainty
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.
Throughout the texts, perception vs reality/truth is a very common theme. In the story Zoo by Edward D. Hoch, the author deceives the reader into believing they will know the outcome of the story. “Peoples of Earth, this year you see a real treat for your single dollar--the little-known horse-spider people of Kaan--brought to you across a million miles of space at great expense. Gather around, see them, study them, listen to them, tell your friends about them” (Hoch, 5). ``There are bars to protect us from them. We remain right in the ship. Next time you must come with us. It is well worth the nineteen commocs it costs” (Hoch, 15). The author wants the readers to believe they know the whole truth to the story, when in fact, the readers do not.
Between the two schools of epistemology, rationalism and empiricism, I am inclined towards the philosophies of rationalism. I am persuaded towards philosophical approaches which are superior at attaining truth. Empiricism relies on observation using the five senses in reasoning to achieve truth. However, in Plato’s Thaetetus, Socrates gives strong arguments for the limitations of human perception. The Canadian legal system, also, recognizes flaws in human observation, which increases my skepticism of empiricism. Conversely, rationalism relies solely on the use of logic and deduction in reasoning. Both, Plato and Socrates stressed the value of rationalism through the ability to know and express combinations of elements through mathematics. Large
“Ways of knowing are a check on our instinctive judgments.” To what extent do you agree with this statement? Often times, when people can’t form a logical reason for certain things they did, their justification is “because I had a gut feeling”. Indeed, people sometimes make judgments based on their gut feelings, or intuition. It is a very subjective and interesting way to gain knowledge. Our intuition can trick us into traps in which we never thought we would fall; it can also lead us to bold, unconventional decisions which bring us truth and knowledge. Our instinctive judgments often become more justifiable when they are “checked”, or verified, by other ways of knowing. Before I answer the
ABSTRACT: The aim of this paper is to defend a broad concept of visual perception, according to which it is a sufficient condition for visual perception that subjects receive visual information in a way which enables them to give reliably correct answers about the objects presented to them. According to this view, blindsight, non-epistemic seeing, and conscious visual experience count as proper types of visual perception. This leads to two consequences concerning the role of the phenomenal qualities of visual experiences. First, phenomenal qualities are not necessary in order to see something, because in the case of blindsight, subjects can see objects without experiences phenomenal
Perception checking is a good tool to help me understand others accurately instead of jumping to conclusions or assuming that your first interpretation is the correct one. For example, my cousin and I are very close and we always talk on the phone for hours. When I have not heard from her in the few I thought she was mad at me or maybe she does not want to talk to me anymore. So then thought about it and I decided to call her, but when I called her phone was no longer in service. That is when I realize I was wrong for assuming my cousin was mad at me, instead of assuming I should have try another way to get in contact with
Sense perception is one way that allows us to interact and communicate with each other and the world. This is our primary way of knowing because our senses live experiences that we go through. Based on our senses we are to make interpretations of the world. For example, in class, each pair was given a box. Inside the box, there was one metal ball, but you had to figure out the structure or the form of a maze inside the box. We couldn't see inside the box, and we couldn’t touch the inside of the box. By using our sense of hearing and another way of knowing, imagination, we were able to make an educated guess of what the inside structure of the box looked like.
Perception is the way in which we view reality, ourselves, others and the world around us. The reality is the real state of things. In fact, it is how things are, whether we perceive them to be or not. Perceptions are based on experience and then experience leads to belief. Most feel their beliefs are true, however, all they have is their perception. Perception comes from how they choose to describe their experiences, or how they have been taught to understand them. Truth does not always come from experience; it comes from facts and
Our vision is perceived to be our most trusted sense, as the old saying goes ?seeing is believing? thus
Perception is the process of individuals interpreting their impressions to give meaning to their environment. The concept of perceptual errors is how a person’s behavior is based on their perception of what reality is, not on reality itself. Perception is the process by which an individual selects, organizes, and interprets information inputs to create a meaningful picture of the world. The attribution process guides our behaviour, regardless of the truth of the attribution.
The Platonic separation of perception and knowledge proves to be problematic because it offers a powerfully complex record of recognition and its relationship to knowlege. As a consequence of its portrayal of judgment, the ideology gives unreasonable conclusions that every individual are faultlessly right at whatever point they see, accept, or think something. The undeniable misleading quality of this ideology demonstrates the hazardous philosophical errors that can result from the inaccurate thinking of sense awareness, while the supernatural assets that the hypothesis creates to portray recognition proves to offer a predominant representation of sense awareness.
Perception is reality to the person who sees, reads, or hears something. Perception is influenced by culture, gender, physical space, race, ethics, morals, educational levels, tone or perceived tone of communication. The way I try to overcome perception is by being aware of nonverbal aspects of interactions with others. I also try to be aware of my own nonverbal behavior and be sensitive to how they may be perceived.
Perception is defined as how you look at others and the world around you. Being able to select, organize and intercept information starts the perceptual process. Perception affects the way people communicate with others. An individual’s pattern of thinking can affect their perception of others. Most people communicate best with people of similar cultures.
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