Logic and Perception

Logic and Perception

A human’s ability to think constitutes the human’s ability to live. Though life can and does go on without thought, thoughtless life would hold no meaning for most of us. Our thoughts fill our days and give meaning and purpose to our days to come. Through perception, we become aware of our environment through physical sensation (Merriam-Webster, 1997, p.546). Every single experience and observation, every smell and sound, that enters our mind through perception is then fused together and associated with other related fusions to become thought, …our very lives as we know them.

The ability to sift through our thoughts and peel away the individual facets of those sensations and perceptions which make up our thoughts is called critical thinking. More specifically, critical thinking is the act of combining various, associated thoughts and perceptions with logic and reason to form educated assumptions and answers which speak to that which we did not know before. Critical thinking, just as its name implies, is absolutely vital to life and ensures that the world around us operates in an orderly fashion. Without critical thinking, the world would be full of experienced and seasoned people with a vast sea of knowledge at their disposal, but no way to apply it to any part of daily life.

Whether we are aware of it or not, we all think critically on an extremely regular basis, so much so that thinking critically often comes, well, “without thinking”. Even so, we could all stand to become better and more frequent critical thinkers. Too often, we rely purely upon perception to lead us to assumptions and answers. We tend to perceive situations with a mind which is closed by personal barriers which block the process of critical thinking. Instead of delving into the “why’s and how’s”, we simply take things for their face value. At this point, we are usually ready to apply a sound logic to hasty and incorrect perceptions, an application which typically leads to false inferences. Logic is defined as, “a science that deals with the rules and tests of sound thinking and proof by reasoning” (Merriam-Webster, 1997, p. 436). Logic is much like a scientist’s experiments and rules by which he/she turns an unfounded hypothesis into a theory or law based upon observed tests. L...

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...olic faith, I have learned a great lesson about the differences between assumptions born from perception and logic and those of critical thinking. I have also corrected a mistake in my own thoughts and beliefs concerning one of the most important men of the twentieth century. This example and several others not cited have come to my attention in the last week to inspire me to implement a new though pattern, a new thought process which involves a sort of “tabula rasa” of my own to be filled by knowledge born of critical thinking, as opposed to a full page of unfounded perceptual logic. Indian poet, playwright, essayist, and Nobel Prize winner, Rabindranath Tagore, summed up my newfound process by saying, “A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.” (http://en.thinkexist.com)

References

Merriam-Webster (Eds.). (1997). The Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, Incorporated.

Kirby, G. R., & Goodpaster, J. R. (1999). Thinking (2nd Ed.). Prentice-Hall, Incorporated, an imprint of Pearson Education, Incorporated.

Tagore, R., Quote retrieved May 22, 2005, from search on website,

http://en.thinkexist.com.