Glasses provide different perspectives

In chapter 25, when Alberto tried to explain Kant's philosophical theory to Sophie, he asked her to put on a pair of red-tinted glasses as an experiment. As a result of looking through those glasses, everything Sophie saw was in different shades of red. Although the world then became red to Sophie, was it really red? No. Kant's point was that both rationalists and empiricists are partially correct about how we perceive things. Empiricists think that our knowledge is obtained from the sensations we experience. We are born without knowledge of things in our new world, but we learn from experiences. Alberto gave an example of this: say you've never eaten an green apple before, therefore, you don't know what it is. But after you've eaten several, you will learn of its colours, taste and texture. Then in the future you can tell that a green apple is a green apple either by looking at it or tasting it. So, in the red-tinted glasses experiment, the glasses have provided a new colour sense to Sophie, giving her a different view of the world.

However, as answered before, how the world appears to be doesn't mean it is that way in real life. It's like how you can't judge a book by its cover. Although I can't deny that the cover design does affect my decision when selecting books. So I understand why Kant partially agrees with the empiricists. But if the world isn't necessarily the way it appears to be to the human eye, then how do we know what it really is like? This is when Kant supports the rationalists' view; knowledge is gained from the reasoning of the human mind. Descrates, a rationalist, believes that "The more self-evident a thing is to one's reason, the more certain it is that it exists." Sophie's reason and memory tells her that the world is multi-coloured, therefore, she doesn't accept the new red insight of the world.

Another example of learning from reasoning is that people long ago reasoned that the world is not round, and if one continues to travel is one direction, eventually one will reach the edge of the world and fall off. This idea came to their mind because when one looks across a landscape anywhere around the world, it looks flat. As a result of this observation, the image of a flat, vast piece of landscape with all the countries and seas was conjured up in people's minds. Personally, I think this theory is very reasonable. But unfortunately, yet fortunately, they were wrong.

There are many types of glasses (such as sunglasses, shortsighted glasses and 3-Dimensional glasses), each giving the wearer a different perspective of sight. However, it is not just the glasses that we wear that affect our insight, our individual reasoning is another factor that makes everyone have a different perspective of things. For example, a shortsighted friend and I have different degree of shortsightedness, therefore one pair of glasses won't satisfy the both of us. Another example is that people may have the same knowledge of certain facts, but how they interpret them would vary. Overall, I think that glasses just give people a new perspective of what they see.