HOW RELIABLE IS THE KNOWLEDGE PROVIDED BY OUR SENSES?

Sense-perception is the awareness of things by sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. One persistent and traditional problem, sometimes called “the problem of perception”, is created by the phenomena of perceptual illusion and hallucination: if these kinds of error are conceivable, how can we always trust our senses to provide us with reliable information?

I think sense perception is an important way of knowing. It is used really commonly, with a majority of knowledge is gained through sense perception. We sit in class – use sight to read the notes and our hearing to hear the teacher say important things. Although some people are born with disabilities where they do not have access to one or more sense.

 In class we had an interesting task of trying to explain the color red to a blind person. It was an impossible challenge. With that I was able to draw a theory that people with disabilities where one or more of their senses is impaired, experience the world differently than we do, and it is hard to explain to them what they cannot experience. Another example is trying to explain how music sounds to a deaf person.

In a subject like History where it solely relies on recorded evidence or physical evidence that is found many years later, sense perception may be used during the time of event, where the witness may write down what they see as what is happening, even though they may misinterpreted something incorrectly, but we have to trust their sense. It is also a problem when it comes to having eyewitnesses in court. A person finds it quite challenging to remember small details, with added stress and pressure of crime (maybe it is even very gruesome) it is very difficult to judge a suspect solely based on the eyewitness testimonial. Although nowadays it is generally just used as a guide and never taken very seriously without strong evidence.

Overall, sense perception is a significant way of knowing, but sometimes we should be aware of the limitations of our senses and combine other W.O.K to be sure of a knowledge claim. Do the horizontal lines appear straight? They are.

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This image appears to have bent lines to our eye, although all lines are straight. This is an example of where our sight may be incorrect in perceiving the right image.