Other examples include: blindness preventing one from seeing things, Deafness preventing a person from hearing. Overall, our senses have a lot of room for inaccuracy in countless situations. However with technology there are alternative ways to work around these impedes. Such as using a thermometer to give accurate readings of the temperature instead on guessing what the temperature might be. However, all of these ideas do not necessarily mean we should never rely on our senses. Many of us are able to recognize if a storm is about to begin, or even if its going to rain soon.
Many of us can estimate the eight of something with fair accuracy. I my self has done with several times while traveling and didn’t have access to a weighing scale. Senses can also be the right answer when in a situation where one has to take sudden actions. Be it in a volleyball game when the player has to decide which way to play the ball or deicing whether to eat apple that looks dirty and poisoned. Since we cannot base all our opinions and judgments solely on senses, reasoning plays a key role in determining truth. We use our senses to determine that a given phenomena occurs, and reasoning to determine why that phenomena occurred.
Reasoning is evident especially in mathematics and the sciences. For example, Gregor Mendel observed the patterns visible in generations of organisms. Mendel then conducted experiments in which he cross-pollinated several varieties of pea plants and discovered that genetic traits are passed between successive generations in specific and regular ratios. Using those ratios, he formulated the laws of heredity, which enable us to predict which traits, and in what proportions, will show up in a particular generation, based upon the traits that have appeared in preceding generations.
Using this experiment we can draw to a close that the sole use of senses without reasoning is not sufficient evidence of truth, and reasoning without the use of senses is incomprehensible; if we were to not use or trust our senses at all, we would have observed or obtained nothing to reason in the first place. In conclusion, our five senses – sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing – are critical in observing the world around us and interconnecting the various ways of knowing.
The brain constantly uses reasoning to apply meaning to the observations made through the use of our senses. However, one should acknowledge hat there are certain situations in which our senses can lack accuracy. We should not be quick to trust our senses when they conflict with each other, when they conflict with another individual’s senses, or when they are being degraded by external factors. However, we should certainly trust our senses to give us knowledge and truth when we can back them up with sufficient reasoning or experience.
Therefore, it can be said that all known truths have been obtained through the use of senses together with reasoning. We should trust our senses to give us truth only when the knowledge we obtain is public, independent of anyone’s belief, eternal, and can be justified with reasoning. Word count: 1180 Show preview only The above preview is unformatted text This student written piece of work is one of many that can be found in our International Baccalaureate Theory of Knowledge section.
