Assignment #2

Revisit the "red-tinted glasses" extended metaphor in Chapter 25 ('Kant'). What's the meaning of it? How do these questions of perspective apply to your own life? Use examples from the novel and your life to illustrate your understanding of the "red-tinted glasses" metaphor/experiment.

The metaphor "red-tinted glasses" shows that our views of the world differ depending on our experiences. It all comes down to personal perspective, how we see things, how we interpret them. However, this perspective can easily be "bent" due to our communities, our beliefs, our families and friends.

An example would be people with disabilities, most people tend to look to them as inferior people, people who are of less importance than us regular people. This leads to discrimination, where they are treated differently because they are seen as a different group of people. This not only goes for people with disabilities, but also goes for Blacks. Racists all around the world classify them as subnormals and don't treat them normally. The thought of people being treated in a diverse manner because they are "different" from us is disturbing. I don't see how them being different gives us the right to mock them, treat them differently. If we are given the right, why aren't they? From their eyes we are also seen as different, why don't they treat us they way they treat us? Yes, some of them do, but only because the "normal" people discriminate them first.

Rationalists believe that knowledge comes from reason, from within our minds. Everything that we acknowledge must have a sense of reason within it in order for it to be "correct". This could also be true as things without a reason don't make "sense" to some of us in the world. There has to be a reason behind everything or it becomes idealistic.

Empiricists believe that knowledge about the world comes from our senses and experiences of the world itself. In a way this is true because if we put on our "red-tinted" glasses, our views of the world might have changed, but the way we see the world doesn't mean that the world is the way we see it.

I believe that the way both Rationalists and Empiricists think are true. For myself, I believe that everything must have a reason behind it, or it doesn't work and bugs me constantly. If I was told something and a reason was not given for it, I would try to think of a reason for it, a logical one so that my brain can "process" it and "approve" it. I also believe that our perspective can be bent because of our senses and experiences of the world. My thoughts towards things are easily affected by things around me; my communitiy (friends / family), school and my own religious belief. This then leads me to wonder why I think things as they are. The fundemental question: why. However, I believe that this "red-tinted glasses" is only blinding us from the truth, protecting us from the realities of this world.

- Kevin -_-''