The Convergence of Knowing and Understanding - Essay Example

Theory of Knowledge ID Lecturer We seeand understand things not as they are but as we are. Discuss this claim in relation to at least two ways of knowing.   I completely support the statement that says, we see and understand things not as they are but as we are. It is absolutely a compelling difference and an accurate fact that there exists an affiliation linking the outer world and the human mind and that there is no knowledge of realism or truth with no human minds; which means that knowledge comes from an interface amidst human brains and the exterior world. Knowledge is all the game of how the human brains see things. Isn’t it a fact that if I saw an orange and illustrated it to be an orange that is bitter but juicy, and if you see the same orange and consented with my comprehension that the orange is bitter but juicy, is it not that we are perceiving the same thing? This signifies that no knowledge of reality exists without involvement of human minds. There is no certainty in the information that arrives from a disagreement between the world and the human brain. But would that not craft our declaration to be subjective? Certainly, if we would have divided the orange over dinner and we were having it at this very moment we would certainly have a difference in our opinion. The human being’s mind, structures the world as per its knowledge requirements and our culture surely confines the way we perceive and comprehend but the query evolves that do we experience identical realities. If the statement ‘We see and understand things not as they are but as we are’ is spot on, than truth has stable variables as well as maneuvering variables. If an orange is an orange it is a stable variable in trueness. An orange’s characteristics are diverse obviously from orange to orange. Some are bitter, some are big and some are brighter. But when observing a singular orange, placed on the dining table, it is stable in its situation in the world. The maneuvering variables are the human minds on which it is being viewed. Every single human brain is subjective, as each brain considers the orange as slightly different from another in one way or the other. Like a person might see it and fear to have a throat infection while another person could see it just as a fruit which has a delicious juice flavor. The four different ways of knowing are perception, emotion, language and reason. To understand them better let’s take the example of a crocodile, which individuals might see in the woods, in a zoo, or in those recent Mountain Dew commercials, as a seen and understood thing. Then capture a wild life biologists perceiving and comprehension of a crocodile, an accomplished hunter’s perceiving and comprehension of a crocodile and a wild life tourists perceiving and comprehension of a crocodile after it has assassinated one of her fellow tourists. They all would never be possibly perceiving and comprehending the crocodile in an identical way. Some might perceive and comprehend it more emotionally while some may be perceptual, linguistic or rational. Devoid of our perceptions, we would encompass no knowledge of the world out there. On the other hand, the logic we make out of those perceptions and often even the perceptions themselves are intensely subjective through our reminiscences, experience, and our neuro-system. For example, in the arts I might see a ship in an abstract painting which I would really like but am not sure if the rest are seeing the same thing as well and if they like it too, this makes up a perception of my own, my view of seeing the thing, which means what survives is only the observer and the demonstration but no object. Our understanding of the world is not only affected by what is out there but also by our brains and integrally by our senses. Each individual has his own way of perception, the course or consequence of becoming aware through the senses, according to the various experiences one goes through in life (Morton 2003). Let us see the statement in light of how our brain perceives the world around us. We view the world through our five senses. Our five senses are touch, sight, smell, hearing, and taste. Most of our knowledge does come to us via our five senses through perception. Perception itself is a complicated phenomenon. We experience the world around us part by the world itself and part by ourselves. We do not submissively collect information through our five senses; debatably, we put in just as much to our experiences as do the objects that they are experiences of. Perception is a reflexive and comparatively clear-cut process which gives us an exact portrait of realism. Perception consists of two discrete parts sensation, the element provided by the world around us and interpretation, the element provided by our brains. All we observe exceeds through individual filters, a mechanism where certain frequencies are rejected while some are accepted and can easily pass through. The individual’s filters are discrete depending upon what one chooses to reject or pass. Comprehending how things exactly are would essentially be finding out every individual’s understanding as to what he believes in, what phases of knowledge he focuses his life upon, his culture, religion and everything that influences him. Sense perception is generally the most precise way of seeing what lies behind reality or truth because you have five senses that each symbolize or illustrate to you an element of the real truth (Lehrer 1990). For example, when you view a thing there instantly pops up a feeling about it and that is how the two senses verify each other providing you a precise verification of what you consider or are considering being true. Let us take the vision of a scientist, as a symbol to demonstrate that humans in fact do see and understand things not as they are, but as we are. A scientist is any person who employs himself in a methodical activity to obtain knowledge. If I were a scientist in the modern world, I would be broadly renowned for my yearning to understand why the world is and how it came into existence. The knowledge I attained could advantage global wellbeing, environment, or any country. Scientists in fact observe the same truth. They test on it to provide evidence to verify or refute various theories about the world. Their passion to comprehend this generates the revolutions that outline the world today. They use every possible resource available to them to come up with an objective truth that will profit the society as a whole. For example, if an experiment to find the efficacy of a medicine, just happened to be two folded and randomized the study would be called objective because it fits the methods that are known to improve the trustworthiness of its results. In respect to his analysis the scientist would say that his annotations and his experimentations stay accurate and consequently a scientific fact, everywhere, in parallel of human contemplation (Pickstone 2000). His percepts and emotions would lead him to then believe that he was right, once his study is proven it will help the society and the world will see through his vision. The perimeter of a person’s knowledge reins their genuineness as much as the fact does. This is because the human brain can only grasp what it is revealed to. When observing a thing that is not comprehensible, human minds hunt for something that shall correspond with preceding experiences. Therefore, his perception is extremely vague and consequently subjective. He views things not as they are but as they appear to him. Like the past is a fixed reality and it cannot be changed but different historians perceive past differently which also has a relation to individual’s senses, what their mind responds to and how their senses react to information received is different from one historian to another, that is how they perceive an event differently and state it with a diversified view. Pythagoras was a great mathematician and philosopher who believed that all things are numbers, that the entire universe is ruled by numbers, and that mathematical relationships between numbers determine events and our own behavior, I don’t really believe in this much as every thing is controlled by the human brain itself, how it perceives things according to culture, religion and experiences. Another way of knowing through which we will discuss in this statement is linguistics. Human beings converse with each other via an incredible assortment of languages, each distinguishes the other in countless ways. The languages that we articulate in characterize the way we view the world, our system of imagination, and the approach in which we exist and live our lives. People speaking diverse languages think in their own way. Language is extremely essential to our knowledge, so intensely an element of stating us being human, that it is tough to envisage existing without it. But are languages simply tools for conveying our feelings, or do they really characterize our thoughts and feelings? Truly, language does characterize our thoughts (Cross 2006). Let us take a very simple example. In an art gallery let us examine some eminent examples of characterization in art, the ways in which conceptual entities such as fatality, sin, triumph, or era are specified through human figure. An artist decides all these entities to be painted as a male or female through the language he speaks. For example, German painters are more expected to paint fatality as male, whereas Russian painters are expected to paint fatality as female. Hence, the languages we articulate deeply illustrate our culture, our religion and characterize our knowledge, the world around us and our lives. References Cross, N (2006). Designerly Ways of Knowing. Springer-Verlag Limited Lehrer, K (1990). Theory of Knowledge. Routledge Morton, A (2003). A Guide Through the Theory of Knowledge. Blackwell Publishers Pickstone, J (2000). Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology and Medicine. Manchester University Press Read More