Since humans evolved, we’ve relied on our senses to guide us and help us survive, for without them, we’d have gone extinct a long time ago. Our sight lets us view the world around, allowing us not only to spot danger, but also to explore, and discover new places and objects, whilst our hearing allows us, for example, to survey our surrounding more efficiently. We’ve always needed our senses to survive, so much so that the idea of them being untrustworthy is a worrying thought, but is it possible for this to happen, and can our senses be deceived?
The first issue is what actually is truth? There are many things that we perceive to be true, depending on perspective or our beliefs, which differ from one person to the next, known as subjective truth. For example, when facing another person, with two objects in the middle, like in the diagram shown, for person A, the truth is that the red object is on the left, but for person B this is false, as it’s on the right from their point of view. On the other hand, there truths which are true no matter your perspective. For example, if person A instead said that the red object was west of the blue box, this would be true no matter where someone was viewing them from. Another example of this is 1+1=2 (written in base 10), as this will always be true, no matter your perspective, or learning.
Another issue to determine is the type of truth that’s being looked at. It’s not physically possible for our senses to give us all the truth about something our senses tell us. For example when looking at a painting, a watercolour of a field perhaps, we can see the colours and shapes of the landscape, but how much truth can we really discover from the painting? We can see the way the artist interpre...
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...rly. In the case of a colour-blind person, it’s not possible for them to completely trust their senses to give them truth, although only 1 in 12 people need to worry about this.
Finally, it appears that our senses are a limiting factor when searching for truth, whether it’s a physical limitation, for example a defect in the cones of person’s eyes, a limitation caused by drugs affecting the brain, or the image itself limiting the truth our senses can perceive from it. Overall however, it seems it would be more accurate to say that we can trust our senses completely; it’s our cognitive processing that can deceive our perception of the truth. The way we interpret the information our senses receive can be affected by a number of different things, whether it’s our genetic make-up, our culture, or our experiences, all can change the way the brain deciphers the stimuli.
The Student Guide to Liberal Learning encourages apprentices to consider the significance of what is truth? James Schall, explains the nature of the universe as an open door to seek guidance through the knowledge of the great thinkers as an attempt to better comprehend the ultimate truth of our reality as a whole, to understand how things perfectly align with each other and how to find the ultimate truth that humanity continuously seeks. Furthermore, Schall states that: “…the truth comes from reality itself, from what is. Truth is our judgment about reality.” Schall lays out the initial quest as form of “clear knowledge of truth” while he persuades to stimulate and spark the curiosity of students to seek his or her own truth of reality through a two-step process:
using our senses to see them, this is the way we can also prove the
Throughout this honors ignition seminar, I have come to distinguish between two very useful, and powerful words: subjective truth and objective fact. Subjective truth, as I understand, is truth. The only difference separating it from universal or general truth is “subjective.” Our understanding of truth can cause arguments when trying to distinguish what is universally true. My definition of subjective truth, not necessarily perceived as true to others, is that the truth of something that happened may not be what actually happened to you, but what you felt happened to you. Objective fact, however, are based on facts that cannot be denied. They are legitimate, universal facts that everyone takes as true, but each may have a different interpretation of it. The main differences between subjective truth and objective fact is that subjective truth expresses one's own experience when understand the objective fact. Subjective truth has no correct definition, but I define it as: Subjective truth deals with subjectivity. Something th...
That's why a series of half-truths and exaggerations are each a small part of the truth. The truth is an enigmatic cloud, a mystery; at its very core is truth. This truth can never be obtained, only hinted upon. The ideas that make up this cloud are each different yet circle a similar theme, which is the real truth. Some of these concepts may be at opposite ends and completely dissimilar, but are each a part of the truth.
What is sense perception? Everything we perceive in our senses can be misleading and an illusion. In the article “Perception and Reality” by Keith Wilson (see Article 1), the author goes over some of the aspects of how our perception deceives us to believe in things that aren’t there to begin with. For example are colors real? Well that is relevantly dependent on what is considered real, because real again is a perception of a single individual collecting information and making “sense” out of it. A color being real or not is dependent on how we see it through our eyes, we can 't say that my blue is the same as your blue. We can 't know for sure if what we are seeing for ourselves, is the same as what the person that views that same thing sees
Since most people get their truth through the senses, human nature is uncertain because the senses sometimes are unreliable. The senses are deceptive especially when our experiences are just dreams, not sense perceptions. The “dream argument” by Descartes is a perfect example. What happened in the “Dream argument” is that the Mediator dreamed of clothing in dress gown, but the reality is that he was actually undressed in bed. The only way of knowing the truth is by waking up because it is very difficult to differentiate a dream moment from a waking moment when asleep. The idea of experiencing real things in our dreams, while we actually aren’t is the reason why our senses deceive. Watching the sunrise and sunset is another good example of sense deception. When we see sunrise and sunset, it seems like the sun is moving. I assume that the sun moves because I can see it
In beginning his lengthy phenomenology for identifying the pathway in which Geist will realize itself as Absolute Knowledge, Hegel begins at what many considered the most basic source of all epistemological claims: sensual apprehension or Sense-Certainty. Though the skeptical tradition took this realm as a jumping-off point for making defensible epistemological claims, Hegel sees in the sensual a type of knowledge so general and abstract as to be entirely vacuous. Focusing on the principle that anything known in the Scientific sense must be communicable, through language or its approximations, Hegel shows that whatever the sensual purports to know is inherently incommunicable and therefore cannot represent true knowledge.
Although there is no way to treat colorblindness the people who have it have never known any different; it is not that big of a deal to them. I’m sure that people with colorblindness wonder what it’s like to see color the way other people see it, but t...
What we see in some things can based on our past experiences and things we’vewe have seen before. If you ever look at the clouds during the day and try to decide what you see and then ask someone else what they see it’sit is about very little chance that everyone will see the same thing. This is what I think of
In Stephen Jay Gould’s essay, “Some close encounters of a mental kind,” Gould discussed about how certainty can be both blessing and dangerous. According to Gould, certainty can be blessing because it can provide warmth, comfort and secure. However, it can also be a danger because it can trick our mind with false information of what we see and remember in our mind. Gould also talked about the three levels of possible error in direct visual observation: misperception, retention and retrieval. According to Gould, our human mind is the greatest miracle of nature and the wicked of all frauds and tricksters mixed. To support his argument and statements, he used an example of an experiment that Elizabeth Loftus, a professor from University of California Irvine, did to her students and a personal experience of his childhood trip to the Devils Tower. I agree with Gould that sight and memory do not provide certainty because what we remember is not always true, our mind can be tricky and trick us into believing what we see/hear is real due to the three potential error of visual observation. Certainty is unreliable and tricky.
Truth by dictionary definition is a wholly objective concept: it’s described as “that that is in accordance with the fact or reality,” assuming a single reality-defined as the conjectured state of events-viewed through an omniscient and impartial lens. However once you introduce individual humans with all their prejudices into the equation the truth becomes subjective, every person allowing their personal set of ideals to cloud their judgement and act on their definition of the “truth”, whatever it may be. This unfortunate yet inescapable quality of humans is explored in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, a novel in which each character’s set of ideals and prejudices governs their behaviours and allows it to get in the way of the truth. Set
Perception, at most times, is a credible way to assess the world around us. Without perception, we would not know what to do with all the incoming information from our environment. Perception is constructed of our senses and the unconscious interpretations of those sensations. Our senses bring in information from our environment, and our brain interprets what those sensations mean. The five most commonly accepted senses -- taste, smell, hearing, sight, and touch -- all help create the world around us as we know it.
Each one of us lives in our own unique world of perception. As individuals, we may experience life in an entirely different way through our senses and life experiences. Therefore, perception can be tricky since it is very personal to each one of us. According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, perception has three meanings; (1) “the way you think about or understand someone or something,” (2) “the ability to understand or notice something easily,” and, (3) “the way that you notice or understand something using one of your senses” (2014, para. 1). C.S. Lewis said, “What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are” (n.d., para. 11). In other words,
Can we truly know when something can be considered true or false. The truth can be something that appeals to a person, or that it can reason with a person's knowledge that they have already develop. The knowledge we possess can shape the way we think, so does this also change the in the truth that a person sees. Our knowledge also limits us to what we considered to be true. In our century every year we discover something new so our truth is constantly changing. One of the conflicts that also comes to mind when talking about true and false is whether a true belief counts as knowledge depends on inherently imprecise judgments concerning whether the believer is accidentally right. To analyze the claim I am going to look at the three different theories of truth and how in everything true there is a false aspect to it. The theories are first, the correspondence theory. Second, coherence theory, and lastly pragmatic theory.
Truth can be defined as conformity to reality or actuality and in order for something to be “true” it must be public, eternal, and independent. If the “truth” does not follow these guidelines then it cannot be “true.” Obviously in contrary anything that goes against the boundaries of “truth” is inevitably false. True and false, in many cases does not seem to be a simple black and white situation, there could sometimes be no grounds to decide what is true and what is false. All truths are a matter of opinion. Truth is relative to culture, historical era, language, and society. All the truths that we know are subjective truths (i.e. mind-dependent truths) and there is nothing more to truth than what we are willing to assert as true (Hammerton, Matthew). A thing to me can be true while for the other person it may not be true. So it depends from person to person and here the role of perception comes into play. As truth is a vital part of our knowledge, the distinctions between what is true and what is false, shape and form the way we think and should therefore be considered of utmost importance. We often face this situation in real life through our learning curves and our pursuit of knowledge to distinguish between what is true and what is false. The idea of there being an absolute truth or also known as universal truth has been debated for centuries. It depends on many factors such as reason, perception and emotion.