Should We Trust Our Senses to Give Us Truth?

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Truth can be described in the correspondence, pragmatist and the coherence theories. Truth can generally be defined as the nature of having accord with certain facts and reality. It involves making correct and informed connections between facts and reality. The senses can be defined in terms of sight, hearing, and touch, smelling and tasting. Senses have been used to determine the aspects of reality and mostly, through appearance. The appearance of things has been used in most occasions to make judgments pertaining to the reality and truth. This paper will evaluate whether senses can be used to give us the truths.

One of the issues that can be argued from the discussion is that the senses indisputably give facts about the appearance and about the formation of certain things (Holt 1). The way one person sees a certain object is the same way in which another person will see the same object. For this reason, facts are indisputable when senses are applied in the interpretations of the things that occur in our daily life.

By gaining the facts and information pertaining to certain things, the senses provide for an avenue from where to base our arguments. Firstly, senses provide us with appearance of objects, which may necessarily not represent the reality of the issue. For example, magicians are known to carry out certain stunts and activities that appear to be real when interpreted at the level of our senses. However, the reality is usually concealed through artistic expertise and for this reason the appearance of these demonstrations cannot be taken to be the truth.

Senses cannot therefore be taken to give us the truth about certain concepts. Rather, the senses provide an individual with an idea of the issues present and with the...

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...ng, and smelling may tell an individual about the basics of certain issues. It is therefore important that individuals make use of their emotions and reasoning in order to determine the ideal truths, rather than relying on the appearance of events as recorded by the senses. The analysis there illustrates that senses alone cannot be relied upon to make decisions pertaining to the availability of truth from a certain concepts. There is need for other approaches, and especially empiricism, and rationalism, in order to develop a stronger relationship for gathering the truth elements.

Works Cited

Christian, James L. Philosophy: An Introduction to the Art of Wondering. Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning, 2008. Print.

Holt, Tim. Theory of Knowledge. n.p., 2006. Web. 1 June 2011.

Lagemaat, Richard. Theory of Knowledge for the IB Diploma. n.p., 2007. Web. 1 June 2011.

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