Assignment 2 - Senses and Reasoning

What the “red-tinted glasses” metaphor meant to me was that our senses and perception of things could be altered. Literally, the book suggested that Sophie had seen her surroundings only in shades of red as the filters on the tints had not allowed her to see any other color.Empiricists (such as Locke and Hume) believed that our knowledge came from our senses, they felt that the human interaction with different objects gave us the knowledge we have. Perhaps they would believe that a knife is sharp after touching the blade and that sugar is sweet after tasting it but there is too, reasoning in the mind behind these such as knowing that sugar is perceived as sweet because of taste buds on our tongue.

If we had conducted the red-tinted glasses experiment on empiricists from the past, it would be interesting to see their reaction as I feel that unless they can honestly answer that they believe the world is indeed red, they would find the flaw in their belief. Could they really believe in the things they did without reasoning in their brain at all? Although it is fair to say that if an empiricist baby boy was born with red-tinted glasses attached to his face, then he could say that the world is red, this would be because his perception of his surroundings directly changed the ‘knowledge’ inside his mind, causing the child to believe that his idea of the whole world to be red to be perfectly fine (because he hasn't seen the world without the glasses stuck on his face). Hence here I also suggest that it takes both of the beliefs of the empiricists and rationalists to make sense as their ideology individually had their own flaws.

This is perhaps why Kant was neither an empiricist or a rationalist; the flaws of empiricists being that there is always a reasoning process in our mind before we accept the ‘facts’ fully and rationalists only being able to have their reasoning and ‘facts’ through at one point of their life, interacting with objects through their senses.

One example would perhaps be the idea of the world being round, in olden times where people believed the world to be flat because of their vision of the landscape. Should a rationalist had shown up in that time period and suggested that the world was round, how many people would have been able to accept that? This is because this would challenge the inner ‘rationalist’ part of the empiricists, making them question: ‘Wouldn’t the things drop apart if the world wasn’t flat?’

To conclude, it is felt that the red-tinted glasses was a simple experiment for Sophie to quickly realize how neither empiricists or rationalists had their ideas fully correct and that senses contributes to our reasoning but there is also a ‘rationalist’ part which supports the things perceived in the senses of a person as the quote from Alberto Knox shows: “So you cannot say the world is red even though you conceive it as being so”.