Sense Perception 123423
ToK: Sense Perception Essay
Perception can be defined as one’s opinion and one’s interpretation. One of the forms of perception is sense perception, which is based on the usage of our five senses; the five senses being the ability to taste, touch, hear, see, and smell. The sense of taste allows us to differentiate and categorize sweet, sour, bitter, and salty. Touch gives us the ability to tell the difference of textures. The ability to hear allows us to identify sounds and speech, which plays a big part in our lives. Sight, much like sound, greatly impacts our lives and allows us to visualize the world around us. Finally, smell lets us identify different aromas and determine whether they are appealing or not. These used to be regarded as the only senses, but 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. While these senses may be quite advantageous and help to connect us to this world, they have disadvantages as well.
For example, there have been many studies regarding the eye to figure out just how reliable (or unreliable) it is. The first serious study into how the eye works was done by Hermann von Helmholtz in the mid 1800s. He was a German physician and physicist who investigated a large number of subjects, one of them being the eye. Having decided that vision should be, physiologically speaking, all but impossible, Helmholtz came up with the theory that we construct images in our minds by inferring the whole based on past experience. In other words, we convert the shaky and rather inaccurate pictures generated by our eyes into something that makes sense based on our understanding of the world. However, our eyes can be quite easily deceived by pictures called optical illusions. Two well known optical illusions are the Hermann grid illusion, which was named after its nineteenth century ‘discoverer’, and the
Perception can be defined as one’s opinion and one’s interpretation. One of the forms of perception is sense perception, which is based on the usage of our five senses; the five senses being the ability to taste, touch, hear, see, and smell. The sense of taste allows us to differentiate and categorize sweet, sour, bitter, and salty. Touch gives us the ability to tell the difference of textures. The ability to hear allows us to identify sounds and speech, which plays a big part in our lives. Sight, much like sound, greatly impacts our lives and allows us to visualize the world around us. Finally, smell lets us identify different aromas and determine whether they are appealing or not. These used to be regarded as the only senses, but 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. While these senses may be quite advantageous and help to connect us to this world, they have disadvantages as well.
For example, there have been many studies regarding the eye to figure out just how reliable (or unreliable) it is. The first serious study into how the eye works was done by Hermann von Helmholtz in the mid 1800s. He was a German physician and physicist who investigated a large number of subjects, one of them being the eye. Having decided that vision should be, physiologically speaking, all but impossible, Helmholtz came up with the theory that we construct images in our minds by inferring the whole based on past experience. In other words, we convert the shaky and rather inaccurate pictures generated by our eyes into something that makes sense based on our understanding of the world. However, our eyes can be quite easily deceived by pictures called optical illusions. Two well known optical illusions are the Hermann grid illusion, which was named after its nineteenth century ‘discoverer’, and the
Bibliography: http://psychology.jrank.org/pages/300/Hermann-Von-Helmholtz.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_von_Helmholtz#Sensory_physiology http://www.ibscrewed.org/#!theory-of-knowledge/c1lu6 http://www.metmuseum.org/events/programs/programs-for-visitors-with-disabilities/visitors-who-are-blind-or-partially-sighted http://www.toktalk.net/2009/12/20/linking-questions-history-and-ways-of-knowing/#more-1587 http://theoryofknowledgestudent.com/tok-personal-knowledge-shared-knowledge