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Epistemology - Sense perception

 

Sense perception is a form of extrospection, and as we will see, part of reason. It is a method of finding reality through the reception and processing of exterior stimuli by our senses.

 

Can our senses be trusted? The notion that our senses deceive us is what some people believe. As proof that our senses can be wrong, some others hold dreams or hallucinations. However, the fact is that the validity of our senses is absolute.

 

With the fallacy of the Stolen Concept this is easy to see. It requires for us to gather meaning, understanding and to communicate, through our senses, to understand the proposition "sense perception is wrong".

 

Without appealing to sense data, the assertion that sense perception is wrong in a given circumstance cannot be proven. For example, one may claim that the "bent stick" phenomenon (the situation where a straight object, like a pencil, when partly immersed in water, looks bent) shows that our perception can be imperfect. But how is this possible? Because one has perceived at a previous occasion that the pencil is in fact straight. Such an argument is continuous.

 

Rather, the phenomenon of refraction must be applied when an object is immersed in water, and the correct answer is to realise this. In understanding what we are perceiving the context of the perception is an important factor.

 

Perception is relative, and cannot be pinned down to one side of the observer/object relation:

 

Percept = the object observed and its context + our sense modalities

 

The percept changes when one of the two factors changes.

 

Let's look at our "bent stick example - or in this case bent pencil - again. In a "normal context" we are used to saying that a pencil looks straight. It looks bent when plunged in water. From a "naive realist" point of view, one would therefore say that our senses are wrong. However, the fact that the context in which the object is perceived has changed would not be seen by the "naive realist": the light rays will not be coming at us in a "normal" way, as told by the law of refraction.

 

The way that our nervous system processes sensory data can, likewise, be affected by taking drugs.

 

Likewise, the way our nervous system processes sensory data can be affected by taking drugs. Hallucinations are a result of this. That these hallucinations are constructs of the mind, rather than percepts of "normal", "real" objects, is obvious. However, this change in our sense modalities is a biological consequence. There are different ways of perceiving the same reality, and there is really no "right way" to perceive. Because we are accustomed to seeing things in a "normal way", drug use destabilises our view of reality.

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