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Which of Our Faculties Do You Think Is More Reliable - Reason or Perception? Give Reasons.

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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

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