Sitting in this classroom today, I can see different things around me, smell different smells around the room, feel the keyboard underneath my fingertips, taste the apple I had during lunch and hear all the different sounds coming from all different people in the room. I can say I know this to be true because we perceive the world through our five senses: sight, sound, taste, touch and smell. Knowledge is what we learn, what we gain from our own experiences and what we understand from other people’s interpretations. Our senses provide us with a journey, which we are able to take or reject.
Trusting our senses comes so naturally that we don’t realize what we learn from them. What we do with our senses differs from person to person. People depend on their senses and the knowledge it provides in order to survive. “Perception is the source of all of our knowledge about reality.” Perception is known as something that is automatic, mistakes only happen when your brain starts doing the analysis. Our senses provide us with information, although our brains interpret the information. Even though everyone interprets different things in different ways that doesn’t invalidate our senses in fact it gives us more information to rely on. I believe that sense perception can help us gain reliable knowledge because we rely on our senses in our everyday life because; our senses can prove something to be true or false. For example our sense of touch can prove something to be hot or cold. For common sense, pain is proof enough of the reality of an object, if it hurts then it is real. The five senses are an important source of knowledge; because they don’t reflect reality they actively structure it.
What we don’t realize is that because we rely on senses everyday we don’t realize that our senses deceive us into believing fallacies. We start to misinterpret what we see, we fail to notice details and