Can We Trust Our Senses? Essay

Can We Trust Our Senses? Essay The absolute truth is a journey that leads to never-before experienced realms. The end of this road could never be reached and even the best man will only go a few steps in the right direction. To determine what the truth is and what it is not, a reliability is placed upon what we identify from our senses. This is the standard approach that we as humans take but, it is not necessarily the correct one. Many problems came up when establishing the truth based on our senses and thus they can rarely be fully trusted, this is what we can say when taking bad decisions. Sense is scientifically defined as any of the faculties by which stimuli from outside or inside the body are received and felt, as the faculties of hearing, sight, smell, touch, taste, and equilibrium.  [1]  Senses are important in our lives. We are born with them and we would not be able to live without them, but we have a problem with them we can not identify whether they are true or not. Whether they tell us the truth. We are able to see, hear, touch, smell but we are not aware how much these senses matter to us, we are not able to use them properly. Our senses work best in trying to prove if something stimulating our knowledge of reality, not if what we know is absolutely true, but rather if a new truth stimulates known truths, and the old ways remain the same way. Experience that has been done with our senses previously lets us know that something is not working quietly good. Our actual senses convey the physical world to the extent they can do it without being tricked they are mechanisms, they do not understand and interpret, they give us complete information. Our sensory areas in the brain immediately start to simplify this information till we can attach meaning to it. From that point on the information is interpreted as truth( not counting the wavelength, certain pitches, because this would make a minor difference to our understanding of truth). There has always been a problem in distinguishing between something that is true and  something that is not true, because how exactly do we know if its true or if its not. In this  essay truth is going to be defined as conformity with fact or reality; verity.  [2]  Truth can be  defined by senses, however it is very hard to say that form the definition. For example lets  have two brothers Andy and Harry. Andy and Harry have the same perfumes and wear the  same clothes. Harrys friend thought he saw and smelled Harry passing by but actually it was  Andy. We can now say that our senses are not right, because as the friend smelled Harrys  perfumes and saw the clothes of Harry his senses were wrong it was Andy which passed by. This example is showing that senses can tell us truth, only on certain grounds. So there are five definite senses: sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch. Going back to the essential question, When should we trust our senses to give us truth? In other words, in what aspects of our life can we trust ourselves to understand the true reality of what we believe is happening? Must we really rely on our sense perception for everything? The functioning of all the senses may give us true, but isnt true based on our perception A good example of the above statement is the belief in God we believe in him but actually we dont see him. So do we really trust our senses if we believe in God. We can not see him we can not hear him we can not touch him and we believe in him, also here is the truth in that. So do we really relay on our senses and do they really tell us the truth? Now what causes that is that the faith and for us that becomes the ultimate truth. Another example would be when you have a cold or you are sick can you still trust your senses? If you have a blocked nose then you can not smell anything, so should you still trust your sense of smell? Or should you just ignore that and trust the other senses. A well known philosopher A.J. Ayer. A.J. Ayer (1910-1989) was only 24 when he wrote the book that made his philosophical name, Language, Truth, and Logic (hereafter LTL), that was published in 1936. This book defines, explains, and argues for the logical positivsm, sometimes referred to as the criterio n of significance or criterion of meaning  [3]  . It explains how problems might be solved by the principle of verifiablity. In these views Ayer saw himself as continuing in the line of British empiricism established by Locke and Hume, whose representative was Russell. Throughout A.J Ayer subsequent career he remained with his traditions rejection of the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge. He saw philosophy method to be the analysis of the meaning of key terms, such as causality, truth, knowledge, freedom.  [4]  . He has investigated the concept justified true belief. Ayer has argued that existence is not a predicate( what is a predicate? In the sentence. Alex is slow is slow is the predicate) A persons sense of perception isnt exactly true that the object exists. Using the above example is Alex exists or not this does not change the fact that the perceive of Alex is slow. Basically what he was trying to say that for something that has to be known, it has to be beli eved, justified( senses for example) and true. The difficulty is proving if something is true or not for example in science we dont prove something we just support it. There is also the question how to test for accuracy which also can make our true different, so for example if we have a really accurate results for testing truth this can lead us to finding out what is truth actually. There is another theory of knowledge known as justified racialism this thory is about that where in order for a knowledge claim to be knowledge it has to be believed, true and justified according to a reliable cognitive process there is a lot of debate over what constitutes a reliable cognitive process and in particular about whether the senses are trustworthy enough to be this process  [5]  . Summarising your senses are the inner being of our souls and that is what needs to be used fist. Trust can be broken our senses tell us when something is wrong and if we chose to ignore our senses and trust what someone is telling us we can end up being hurt and if we go on emotions boy, children get hurt many times when they feel that bad and trust that a bad person with a sob story will tell them. This is when they do not trust their senses for example if their hand is hurting and their friend tells them to play they ignore their senses and just continue playing then they sib at home, due to the fact that the hand is hurting and they cant play football any more, because their hand is broken. So we do need to trust our senses. But our senses as I said before never give us true they give as data which we can use or ignore as the kid in the story above. Truth is not something we sense, it is something we recognize. The data that our senses give us is pretty accurate, we just have to k now how to use it correctly. On the other hand our interpretation of that data is many times in error. Emotion is the bodys reaction to thought, I will again use the example of the boy playing football he didnt trust his senses he kept playing football and after when he came back home he couldnt lay any more football, his body reacted to his emotion, the hand was hurting. We can trust the information that emotion imparts only as far as we have been able to become aware of how it operates in our lives. All emotion is giving us information about ourselves and the best way of accepting that is to know our way of living. If we know our reaction to emotions we know ourselves. Concluding we can not identify if we should trust our senses or not, sometimes we should trust our senses and sometimes there are situations that we should not trust our senses.