When Can We Trust Our Senses to Give Us Truth - Essay Example

When can we trust our senses to give us truth?” As human beings we are in constant touch with our senses and rely on them to connect us to the environment. It is our sense of sight which enables us to see the trees, it is our senses of hearing which allows us to hear music or conversation, our sense of touch lets us experience the physicality of another living or non-living being and our sense of taste permits us to understand the difference in flavors; our senses help us deal with and appreciate our surroundings but whether our senses tell us the absolute truth or not is subjective for, two people may see the same thing with the same sense of sight yet, perceive it differently or two individuals may hear the same thing and yet put different connotations to it. Therefore, the word ‘truth’ has to be defined first. Something can be called the truth only if it is accepted by everyone as genuine but this again, differs from culture to culture, society to society and individual to individual. A child brought up in the Christian faith may not regard the Islamic faith to contain the truth and vice-versa. But, there are millions whose lives revolve round the Bible and they consider it to be the truth. Our societies also influence our interpretation of truth. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy which deals with the nature of truth and knowledge. The word ‘episteme’ comes from the word knowledge and ‘logos’ from the word theory. This branch of philosophy questions the definition of knowledge, the source of knowledge, the extent to which we can ‘know’ the difference between knowledge and belief, knowledge and opinion and knowledge and faith. It wonders whether truth is absolute or relative and whether it is in conjunction with only the individual’s opinion or is it collective. One may specifically define Epistemology as the study of knowledge and justified belief. Knowledge can correspond to knowing of anything from a person, a place to a subject. If we consider propositions then we refer to knowledge as justified belief. Epistemology aims towards understanding the concept of justification and what makes such beliefs justified. Epistemology also needs to answer the internal and external issues of justification (whether justification is internal or external to the mind). It essentially reviews the nature, processes, restrictions, and feasibility of knowledge as well as belief. The study also involves means production of knowledge and skepticism (skepticism involves understanding whether such knowledge is possible) about the various claims of knowledge. Justification can be deontological and non-deontological. For instance, deontological justification is the righteousness of conducting an action when one is not obliged to refrain from doing so. When we believe in something and not bound to refrain from believing that, we are nurturing a justified belief. For an instance a person may lie to another persons inappropriate question as he/she is not obliged to satisfy the other with his/her answer. Philosophers such as Descartes, Locke, Moore and Chisholm have perceived justification in the deontological terms.  Non-deontological justification is based on the probability of the action performed or the belief held. Knowledge can be categorized as apriori and posteriori. Apriori knowledge talks about the gain in knowledge irrespective of any experience or empirical evidence. Thus this logic is non empirical. Posteriori knowledge signifies gaining of knowledge through experience or empirical evidence. Thus posteriori knowledge is empirical in nature. According to Plato, knowledge and truth were changeless forms and to know anything was to apprehend the form of it. The natural world was fleeting and sensory perceptions constantly shifting. The only static form was true knowledge and which was reached not by senses but by reason. But, Aristotle refuted this theory and maintained that truth was the correspondence of thought with objective fact. Then again, the Industrial revolution overturned Aristotle’s theory that matter was made of five elements and was continuous. Aristotle’s concept of motion, that it is brought by cause and would last as long as the cause would last was also replaced by one of that motion was continuous without any need of further cause. The intellectual seeds of the Industrial revolution can be said to have been planted by the principles and ideas laid by Bacon in the seventeenth century. This aimed at expansion of the set of applicable and useful knowledge and application of natural philosophy towards resolving technological problems, thus bringing about economic growth. Francis Bacons philosophy basically brought about an empirical approach during the 17th century. A convention of research and scientific experimentation was eventually introduced in to the system in the place of Aristotelian concept of natural and artificial circumstances. The ideas of counting, classifying, cataloguing were important components of Baconian ideas that guided the intellectual growth preceding the industrial revolution. The idea of measurement and tabulation was generated thoroughly. Instead of mere deduction from common facts (Aristotelian concept that analysis of known facts promotes a better understanding), Bacon preached the idea of an inductive approach towards nature. He advocated the abandon of assumption and observation of everything with an open mind. Human beings can assume many things by the use of their senses but to correctly arrive at a conclusion the intellect has to be used and so, mind over the senses mattered as sensory observations were also very subjective and could never be objective.  Francis Bacon had referred to all knowledge being his province. As he indicated in his Aphorisms, “that period there was but a narrow and meager knowledge either of time or place, which is the worst thing that can be, especially for those who rest all on experience. For they had no history worthy to be called history that went back a thousand years -- but only fables and rumors of antiquity”1. Descartes, Spinoza advocated that things in the world were known through reason and intuition and were not dependent on experience. Reason was inspired by Forms or by God or by an innate sense and mathematical truths could be understood by reason alone. Rationalists like Descartes did not deny that senses provided reports of things but they did not believe that observation and experience only could lead to the truth. According to them, knowledge was acquired by apriori process in which experience did not count. Descartes based the definition of knowledge in terms of doubts. According to him the epistemological gap between the subject and the objects of reality could be removed if the conviction of knowledge was so strong that there would be no doubts. Hence there would not be any reason for doubts to exist. He exemplified that once we believed in something we took it to be the truth without doubts2. Doubts and certainty were inversely related. As doubt increased certainty decreased and vice versa. Thus if knowledge was to be complete and based on certainty then there should be no doubt at all or an inability to doubt ones conviction. Another rationalization was that a person might have held many concepts and beliefs from his childhood but as he grew up many of them became irrelevant and may have proved to be false. Thus, awareness was the key to knowledge and which affected our perceptions of the truth in relation to our senses3. (Locke, 387) The theory of Empiricism led by Locke believed that knowledge was derived from experience, either by directly observing like by using the senses of sight, hearing or taste, or by experimentation by examining things under a microscope in the lab. Though Locke didn’t reject the idea of reason altogether and even admitted that reason played some part in cognitive science, he outright dismissed the notion that knowledge could be attained only by the use of reason. According to John Locke the only way to know the world was through experience of the senses. The link between reality and the mind was our senses. What came to the mind was through our sensory perceptions. There were innumerable ideas around the world and the world interacted with the organs to cause ideas in our minds. Complex ideas could be broken or split down into different parts and according to Locke certain things, which one had not perceived directly could be perceived by the integration of different components. Ideas could also be simple, for example the color red was a simple idea. (Locke) In this way simple ideas could be combined to form complex ones. Such ideas therefore arise out of simple sensations or senses. Immanuel Kant tried to bring about a synthesis between the rationalist and the empirical school of epistemology by highlights the differences between the statements, judgments and propositions of the debate between the empiricists and rationalists. He kept a distinction between analytic and synthetic and at the same time between apriori and a posteriori propositions but at the same time suggested that some of these judgments could occur simultaneously. According to Kant, rationalists were correct when they said that we could know about the world with certainty. Again, empiricists were not wrong when they said that knowledge could not be restrained only to mere truths. Thus, he stressed on the fact that we knew the world as we had experienced it so far with the help of our unfaltering and globally shared mind-set. The rational human beings perceived the world in terms of cause and effect, unity, plurality, possibility, reality and necessity. When we conceptualized anything, we needed to perceive it in a particular way, the way something existed or something had to exist. The way the world existed was the same manner in which our minds experienced stimulation. Knowledge existed because of the way it appeared to us not the way it actually was. Thus, our senses played a primary role in interpreting those perceptions and which we regarded as the truth.  Also, the world was organized in a certain predetermined way. This would encourage innate ideas and concepts. We may never experience things that we do not conceptualize or organize in our minds. Examples can be god, soul and other metaphysical topics. (LaFave) A statement or belief is true if it goes with the facts. Truth is the characteristic of a statement. The facts exist independently of our knowledge of them. Therefore the only way to know the truth is by checking whether our beliefs do match with one another. But, in this scenario, it is possible that two people may hold the same true belief but for different reasons, so that one man’s belief becomes justified while other’s is unjustified. Similarly, the fact that the belief is justified does not imply that it is either true or false. When it comes to our senses, each person has his perceptions which according to the way he perceives them make them true, at least to himself. So, the question of when should we trust our senses to give us the truth will always remain within the realm of subjectivity and even amalgamating all the epistemological theories will not draw any conclusive answer. Human beings are unique in themselves and whatever common beliefs they may share with each other, it still does not diminish the fact that each individual’s senses perceives the same things differently or even if those things are seen with the same perception the degree will always differ. Thus, truth is something unique to each human being and senses can only go so far as to give us an idea of what that thing should be like. Works Cited 1. Decartes, Rene, Meditations of First Philosophy, Kessinger Publishing, 2004 2. “FRANCIS BACON: THE NEW ORGANON”, C E.D.Buckner, 2007, retrieved on February 11, 2009 from: http://logicmuseum.googlepages.com/novumorganum-I-68-end.htm 3. Locke, John and Fraser, Alexander Campbell, An essay concerning human understanding, Samuel Marks, Oxford University, 1825 4. LaFave, Sandra, Kant: The "Copernican Revolution" in Philosophy, 2006, retrieved on February 11, 2009 from: http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/KANT.HTM Read More