To What Extent Should We Trust Our Senses to Give Us the Truth
To what extent to give us the truth? Most of the things we know are based on a life-long series of observations and experiments through our own senses. Without our senses, social interactions and critical thinking would be impossible, leaving us only with inexplicable emotions, a close state to nothingness. Despite its significance, however, our senses have limitations ranges from our dependency to language to our own biological limitations. Human beings are inherently provided with these inevitable limitations.
We therefore, as well-educated individuals, must not completely trust our senses as it can easily be deceived. Our dependence on language distorts what our senses are truly getting. In a simple context of analyzing an art piece, for instance in the process of analyzing the nuance of the work, our interpretations of what we see tend to be bounded with the language that we know. Without the use of language, in this context, the art piece will remain abstract in our mind. The emotions that we get from viewing the art piece, for example, can be described with adjectives.
In a wider sense, language influences the way we think. I have encountered an experience where my short eyesight (I need glasses to see “normally”) gave a misleading account to an event. I was in an art convention center with my friend; the place was covered with a realistically structured fake plastic trees. It was part of the art works being exhibited. In the end of the expo I said to my friend, “Nice right! Such great pieces of art shown there! Especially the trees, how on earth can they grow it to form such structure”.
My friend, whose vision is “normal”, told me that it the trees were forgeries. I wasn’t using my glasses at the moment, If I was then I would’ve reacted differently. Biological capabilities limit what we are able to sense and perceive. There are still many factors such as spacial familiarity, past experience; our tendency to see or hear what we expect rather than what really happen; optical illusions or social and cultural conditioning that aren’t being discussed, but also a limitation of our senses.
Although with the chance of getting false knowledge, what important is that we develop critical thinking skills to distinguish between good and bad reasoning. Examining our own perspectives, using our own senses perhaps, and comparing them to those of others and to see what we learn from it is what important rather than abstaining from the pursuit of knowledge due to the limitations of our senses.
