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The Common Sense: The Five Sense Of Perception

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Perception is defined as the awareness of the world through the use of the five senses, but the concept of perception is often used to isolate one person’s point of view, so how reliable can perception be if no one person’s is exactly the same? The word perception itself is riddled with different, well, perceptions of its meaning. When some hear the word they might automatically think of it as something innately flawed, that can easily be fooled by illusions, while others may think of its usefulness when avoiding scalding a hand on a hot stove. I am here to agree with both and to argue that perception is something necessary and helpful, and something that should be scrutinized for its flaws. By looking at perception as a way of knowing in the…show more content…
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. One philosophical school of thought called “common sense realism” or direct realism argues that perception is a passive and relatively straightforward process which gives us an accurate picture of reality, and that to deal with practical demands of everyday life, our senses must be generally reliable, or we would probably not have survived as a species (vdL 87). We gain knowledge from our perceptions every moment we are conscious. Whenever I walk outside in the morning, and I feel a chill on my face, I gain the knowledge that it is cold outside. Sometimes I do not even have to walk outside to tell if it is cold or not. Somedays I can look out the window and see…show more content…
The proverb in the prompt makes the point that someone who has been bitten by a snake, will from that time on then fear anything resembling a snake, like a piece of string. This suggests that our perception is flawed because a person should have no reason to fear a piece of string as it poses no real threat to them, but nevertheless, when they see a piece of string out of the corner of their eye they feel the same fear as if they were to see a snake. Obviously, disabilities in the senses such as deafness or blindness negatively affect a person’s quest for knowledge because they are missing out on an entire sense experience, but even a typical able-bodied person is hindered by their own perceptions in extreme cases and everyday life. One example of this is how our perceptions affect our ability to recall memories. Eyesight is a sense that is very reliant on perception to make sense of the world around us, but that reliance can get us in trouble sometimes when our perceptions become faulty. A very debatable topic in the world of law enforcement and judiciary punishment is the use of eyewitness accounts as reliable sources to conclude the guilt or innocence of a suspect. In the famous psychology experiment done by Elizabeth Loftus, the reliability of eyewitness accounts is questioned. In the experiment, participants were asked to watch videos of different car crash scenarios, and
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