TOK Essay Senses help

[Pima]

Heeey! I have the topic 'we see and understand things as we are but not as they are' Can someone pleaase help me with examples for other senses like hearling tasting? I just found somethings about seeing.

Thaaank you soo much !

[sweetnsimple786]

I understand about 5 total phrases in French, so when I listen to songs in French, particularly, my brain tries to integrate what my ears have received into something I can understand. I hear English words when only French ones are spoken. That's a personal example for me. The best examples are ones straight out of your life. We encounter the shortcomings of perception on a daily basis. Use yours =)

Your prompt asks you to discuss the claim for two ways of knowing, so I don't think you need to cover all of the senses. You can discuss experience related to perception and how we see the world is shaped by what we've experienced due to society or culture or personal circumstance or obstacles/lack of obstacles, etc.

[Sandwich]

'we see and understand things as we are but not as they are'

What they're really trying you to identify is the way in which YOU affect the knowledge you have. Whilst this can be about identifying particular problems with senses, it's really about looking at how things are in-themselves versus how they are after we have processed them into a part of our own lives and how we view them.

There's a whole host of things (well actually, everything) which falls under this quote, but some more obvious ones are things like anthropomorphism -- we "understand" animals as people. If they look unhappy using the visual cues we understand as unhappy, we say that is the emotion they are feeling, because that's what WE do when we are unhappy, or how we would respond and feel in the same situation. We are using the way in which WE understand the world in terms of our emotions, when we feel them and how we feel them, to interpret the way the animals are behaving.

We do this with more than just animals and often falsely give things intentionality, for instance saying things like "the bacteria attack the immune system", which implies an intention, or that the bacteria is actively trying to go out of its way to destroy a particular thing. In reality it's just a collection of chemical reactions.

Then you can look at abstractions, for instance numbers. We understand a lot of things with numbers -- like "I have 5 oranges in this bag". We're understanding the number 5, but in reality we just have an orange, an orange, an orange, an orange and an orange. We're using the way we interpret the world to understand what's going on, but in reality there's no such entity as "5", we just invented it so we could comprehend having five oranges.

One area you might particularly like to think about is art (or just things we find beautiful) and how we interpret it, or see qualities in it.

That's the sort of focus you should have in your topic. All TOK essays want you to identify a single central theme (here: how WE alter and interpret the "knowledge" we have), then you just work in examples and particular areas of knowledge around it. I mean you may have picked up on this already, in which case I apologise for all this rambling, but I got the impression you'd taken "seeing" reasonably literally. It's true that sight is an example (and indeed for all the senses, if you still feel like you want examples for these, you can simply talk about the limitations -- such as only being able to hear within a certain range of frequencies, or having our brains "wired" to pick up particular patterns of speech better than others etc.), but I just thought I'd mention all that stuff so you realised it's about revealing the central idea via the rest of the essay and no matter how many examples you give, it's most important that you pick out this point. If that makes sense at all!

[gratziela]

Sorry.. But, I still don't understand who are "they" in this question..? I mean, are "they" refers to other people or it refers to the things we see?

[Sandwich]

Sorry.. But, I still don't understand who are "they" in this question..? I mean, are "they" refers to other people or it refers to the things we see?

The things we see. There are no people in the question!