I feel as though I have no choice but to be a skeptic about our abilityto know the world on the sense experience given the information that is beingpresented. Our senses are touching, hearing, smelling and tasting, I believe it isquite possible that a person could think they see, touch, and smell somethingsuch as a glass of bear but there be no glass of beer present, therefore theirperception of this glass of beer is false. There is a good possibility thatthis person is suffering from any of the numerous possible sensations, auditory,visual or tactile, experienced without external stimulus and caused by mentalderangement, intoxication or fever, in other words this person could behallucinating.
There are many ways that the senses can be tricked into believing thingsthat are not true, an example is when a person takes the drug LSD, this drug isone which alters the state of the mind and tricks it into visually perceivingthings which are not real such as pink elephants, green rats, gold skin and soon. Hallucinations may occur when pressure is applied to different sections,drawing different reactions from the person being affected, these reactions arecaused by the affected person seeing things which they perceive to be real . Hallucinations are only one way by which the visual perception of an object canbe altered there are many more ways by which the visual perception of an objectcan be altered; for example consider a square envelope, pay very close attentionto what you see when you look at this object. If the envelope does not move butyou do then your perception of this object will continually change as you moveabout and the “square envelope” no longer looks square. Because a square objectsuch as an envelope can’t be square and not square at the same time then thevisual perception of the object must be false.
Another false visual perception would be a mirage, for example when youdrive down a flat stretch of highway on a hot summer day it appears as thoughthere are patches of water on the road up ahead, as you get closer and closerto where the water appears to be it disappears. Another example would beillusions with mirrors such as the ones that David Copperfield performs, in hisperformances he astounds audiences by making it appear as if people arefloating on air. In regard to the debate in section 11 of Philosophical Problems andArguments I tend to agree with premise one which states that we can sometimesbe mistaken in our perceptual beliefs, for example when we hallucinate we aremistaken in our perceptual although we may not realize it at that particularpoint in time. As for premise two I tend not to agree with this one, I don’tbelieve that it is always logically possible that our perceptual beliefs arefalse other wise we would all be hallucinating and I find it hard to grasp thatbillions and billions of people are hallucinating.
As for the final premise andthe conclusion I tend to believe that they are both false because they bothrelay on the second premise being true. It is said that “seeing is believing” but with hallucinations, opticalillusions and other false visual perceptions occurring without people evenrealizing it, you have got to wonder who came up with the term “seeing isbelieving” and how it could ever be possible that somebody would believe such aludicrous statement. Category: Philosophy
