Sense Perception Essay

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TOK Writing Assignment (Sense Perception) By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. -Aldous Huxley (1954) Much of what everyone acquires and takes in form of world base on our five basic senses; touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight, which is known as sense perception. Sense perception is conceived as our private and very first way of knowing, since we are born with sense from which we feel the world around us. Unlike languages, believes, memories and any other ways of knowing, sense perception is a natural ability within us for acquiring the knowledge. In our infancy, sense perception plays a vital role in forming our view towards the world around us with the absence of language, memory and the like. However, it is confident to conclude that baby cannot entirely understand the world via only the sense perception. As we grow up, other ways of knowing such as language, reason and belief take part in helping us to gain our knowledge. For instance, when we cross a road, our sense perception tell us when the traffic light changes the color and what color it turns into, what we base on to decide if we should stop or cross the road are our logic and reason. This idea raises a knowledge question; to what extent does sense perception limit the acquisition of knowledge. The quote above suggests that sense perception is a private and incommunicable way of knowing. In terms of the limitation of sense perception, the inability to communicate and privacy form the obstacle on the way of acquiring our knowledge. This concept narrows the knowledge question down into; how does the privacy limit the acquisition of knowledge. This idea will be explored by discussing different senses
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