MINI TOK essay

TOK mini essay.
Ignacio Lopez Aragon
Knowledge Issue:
To what extent are our senses reliable to distinguish between what we know is true and what we think is true?

All of the knowledge we own comes from our reasoning, our emotions, our language and our sense perception. Human beings have multiple senses, sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. As these senses are part of who we are, we lean on them to give us the truth, that we think its true. Truth is define by Plato as being public, independent and eternal. For, us senses are rather objective, we all feel the heat from the fire, we hear a dog bark and we know its a dog and not a cat. Therefore by means of observation and experimentation we determine our surroundings. We learn to connect the dots when we have to, we know that when we hear a dog barking, that the animal barking is a dog and not a cat, because in the past we have experience the sight of a dog making that sound and know we connect that experience, then we deduce that all animals that bark are dogs. The same with the fire. Yet we might all get the same information but our experiences are the ones shaping that information into our own truth. For example, deductive reasoning, we are used to go a fast food restaurant (e.i Taco Bell) and be surrounded by that smell, meat, cheese, tortillas and the other stuff. Sense I´m a kid I like Taco Bell, specially the smell of it. So know out of experience I deduce that everything that smells like Taco Bell its Taco Bell and thats my truth. Once we stayed in school and had lunch there, my sense of smell stated that the aroma in the air was the same one as Taco Bell, therefore for me we were about to eat Taco Bell. Then the food arrived to the table, and that was not Taco Bell. Like this we see that although the senses, that we think are rather objective, can be controlled by our experiences. I smelled a kind of food that I connected to memory and this lead to misinformation. The smell is the same, but the result is different.

In the end our senses will give us as much truth as we allowed them too. They will not be able to lie to us, because as the are part of who we are they cant lie to us. The same as we cant lie to ourself. But they will not give the definite truth Plato refers too. This happens because we work on a patron deducing things and apply that knowledge to everything else and it does not leave space for interpretation. Therefore our senses are not reliable to give us the absolute truth, but they will not lie to us either

Mini tok paper

KI
To what extent can our senses help us distinguish between what we know is true and what we think is true?

Main points.
Senses can give us unreliable facts.
Our senses will affect our emotions, therefore making us bias or to lean against one idea.
What is true for you might not be true for someone else.

Examples.
When we walk to the lunch room and it smells good, and we think that today is going to be a day of delicious food, then we eat what they serve and the truth is that is not good.
A person who just lost someone important in a car accident, might blame the other driver, the weather anything else, but deep down that person knows it was an accident and no one is to be blame for.