The Tinted Red Glasses - Chloe Chan

The tinted red glasses illustrates Kant’s view of how we enquire knowledge of the world, which is actually a combination of both the Rationalists’ and Empiricists’ analysis of the subject. Rationalists argued that the way we perceive the world is due to our reasoning in the “mind” whilst the Empiricists believed that we learn thorough our sensations where “the world is exactly as we perceive it”. By Kant’s combination of both Rationalists’ and Empiricists’ opinion, Kant articulates that we do learn through our senses, however the way we perceive the world after sensing it varies as there are “decisive factors that determine how we perceive the world”, meaning that there are things (aspects) that will influence how something is perceived .
The tinted red glasses effectively explains the connection between sensing and interpreting something. If the sensation is limited itself (a factor determining how we see the world), the interpretation will also change according to how something is sensed. The tinted red glasses is a factor which determines how we view the world, and it represents a limited ‘sensation’ (which affects the interpretation) where you can only see shades of red, this sensation will then lead to a different interpretation of the world to what it is supposed to be in reality. As a result of the limited sensation we “conceive” that the “world is red” which is not true. This clearly shows us how we can get the wrong view of the world.
The process of stereotyping can be applied into Kant’s theory. For example stereotyping of people from an ethnic group is a factor which can affect our reasoning and because stereotypes are generalisations they are limited ‘sensations’ (ideas). From the stereotypes we hear and learn, we begin to see ethnic groups as having the same characteristics rather than as individuals. These rigid perceptions created of ethnic groups are of course incorrect.