Can We Know When to Trust Our Perceptions in the Pursuit of Knowledge? Consider History and One Other Area of Knowledge. Firstly, What Is Perception? Perception Is the Ability to See, Hear, or Become Aware of Something

488 Words2 Pages
Firstly, what is perception? Perception is the ability to see, hear, or become aware of something through our senses. These senses, consists of many different unique ones. However the five main senses would be sight, smell, taste, touch and sound. Together, they enable the human brain to perceive. However, how accurate are these perceptions? Can they be trusted? Personally, I am against the statement that perceptions can be trusted. In my opinion, there must always be facts to back a perception up. This is because, the human mind does not always see the real picture. For example, while making an observation, we might only see what we expect to see, and not the whole picture. Therefore, results can vary from person to person. One’s perception is ‘attention dependent’, which means if our attention is elsewhere, we may not notice something that is significant. Therefore, a detail that is significant to one person might be completely insignificant to another. This illustrates the inaccuracy of trusting one’s perception. Another knowledge issue related to the trusting our perceptions is that our biases and emotions play a strong part in colouring our reasoning. Everyone is bias one way or another to certain things in life. For example, the discrimination towards blacks. For instance, if there was a robbery, and a witness was questioned, it is highly unlikely that 5 different witnesses would have the same point of view of the event. A person who is bias towards blacks, might have sub consciously chosen to believe that it was the black person he saw, who committed the crime. However, the other 4 witnesses might have completely different accounts of what had really happened. Therefore, as many people as the police question, witness testimony is rarely ever enough to single handedly secure a conviction without any other corroborating evidence. Last but not

More about Can We Know When to Trust Our Perceptions in the Pursuit of Knowledge? Consider History and One Other Area of Knowledge. Firstly, What Is Perception? Perception Is the Ability to See, Hear, or Become Aware of Something

Open Document