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.


In this chapter, Sophie comes across the world with a different point of view, not from thought, but from vision. Knox gives her a pair of 'red-tinted glasses' to wear, and there she has it- a world from a different point of view. Knox's aim was to show Sophie that not everything is really what it seems to be. Only with a pair of red glasses everything that looked normal once, started to look different. This tells us how we have limted senses, and how not everyone would think of something as we think of it. We only respond with the things that we were taught and that have been implanted into our minds, because that is what we started to believe and thought was true. It's just like a matter of opinions- not everyone's would be the same.

This is simply a case of comparing empiricists and rationalists. A rationalist is one who reasons what he sees and believes. An empiricist is the opposite- he believes what he is shown. On personal opinion, a rationalist seems more sensible. Would you believe what you see on television when they show you one actor stabbing another? Is that really what happened behind the screen? I don't think so.Basically, the 'glasses' we wear is the way in which we perceive things. If I say that the apple is red, you may think that it's light red. Our limitations as to how we perceive things blocks our mind from so many things we could've learnt due to our limited senses.