What are the advantages and disadvantages of Sense Perception as a Way of Knowing?
What is Sense Perception? Sense Perception is our primary Way of Knowing. It includes all our 5 senses- sight, smell, touch and taste. It is the reason we are what we are today as the human race, the most advanced species on this Earth. It is our basic point of entry into this world. For example, as a child we see people walk and the way they walk and without reasoning it out we learn how to walk, or sitting on a chair, we don’t ask why he or she is sitting on the chair we just know that a chair is meant to be sat on. This is why I say it is our ‘primary’ Way of Knowing, and then comes reason, emotion and language. Even though there are several advantages
Later we realise it was another person all this while who looked similar to the person she picked out, this makes us wonder- how much can we trust our senses? Her decision while picking out from the people was largely affected by her emotions, since the actual person was not there in the line-up nor in the pictures, her emotions led her to believe that it was that similar looking person.
‘The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.’ -ROBERTSON DAVIES
As it has rightly been said by Robertson Davies, our mind manipulates our senses in such a way so that it does not get confused. For example if we see a five-legged cat, our mind might oversee the fact that the cat has five legs because our mind is prepared to see a cat with only four legs and since it is not prepared to see something unusual it generally manipulates the results to ease its nerves. Even our beliefs tend to fog our thoughts, through Sense Perception we have always heard that there is God and that God exists in some form, but has anybody even seen God? I don’t think so. But when we want something really badly, like just before am exam or test we tend to depend on some form a God, when we ‘pray’ for an easy paper, this is due to our emotions but according to our Sense Perception there is no God. Language always affects our Sense Perception, when people tell us things we tend