How can we know if our senses are reliable? What is the role of expectation or theory in sense perception? What is the role of language in sense perception?
Sense perception is the process by which we can gain knowledge about the outside world. Traditionally, there were believed to be five senses: sight, touch, smell, taste and hearing. However, many now argue that there are others such as a sense of heat, sense of pain, sense of movement, sense of balance and the senses of hunger and thirst, or a sense of where our body parts are.
Historically, the view that the senses provide the basis for all our knowledge was challenged by the idea that prior concepts might be needed before any perception takes place at all. Indeed, it is common now to view sense perception as an active process of interpreting the world according to prior expectations, conceptual frameworks and theories. There is, therefore, some disagreement as to whether we directly perceive the world as it is, or whether perception is an active process where we supply much of the content of our experiences ourselves.
Ways of knowing do not operate in isolation
Ways of knowing should not be viewed in isolation. They interact in various ways in the construction of knowledge and the formation of knowledge claims. For example, even a simple claim such as “this table is blue” involves a number of ways of knowing coming together. I need language to be able to understand the terms “table” and “blue”. I need a conceptual system based on reason to realize that a table is something that has the possibility of being blue. I need sense perception to recognize that what I see is a table and that the colour of the table is blue. In this way, the individual ways of knowing are woven together into more elaborate structures in order to generate knowledge in the areas of knowledge.
Sense perception is the process by which we can gain knowledge about the outside world. Traditionally, there were believed to be five senses: sight, touch, smell, taste and hearing. However, many now argue that there are others such as a sense of heat, sense of pain, sense of movement, sense of balance and the senses of hunger and thirst, or a sense of where our body parts are.
Historically, the view that the senses provide the basis for all our knowledge was challenged by the idea that prior concepts might be needed before any perception takes place at all. Indeed, it is common now to view sense perception as an active process of interpreting the world according to prior expectations, conceptual frameworks and theories. There is, therefore, some disagreement as to whether we directly perceive the world as it is, or whether perception is an active process where we supply much of the content of our experiences ourselves.
Ways of knowing do not operate in isolation
Ways of knowing should not be viewed in isolation. They interact in various ways in the construction of knowledge and the formation of knowledge claims. For example, even a simple claim such as “this table is blue” involves a number of ways of knowing coming together. I need language to be able to understand the terms “table” and “blue”. I need a conceptual system based on reason to realize that a table is something that has the possibility of being blue. I need sense perception to recognize that what I see is a table and that the colour of the table is blue. In this way, the individual ways of knowing are woven together into more elaborate structures in order to generate knowledge in the areas of knowledge.