Red Tinted Glasses - Assignment 2

In chapter 25, Sophie puts on a pair of red tinted glasses, which made her vision to be in shades of red. It seemed that the glasses was limiting and filtering what Sophie was looking at. I think this is quite interesting; as a matter of fact people tend to see one thing but believe another. This goes back to what Kant said there are two types of people, Empiricists and Rationalists.

Empiricists are people who believe all knowledge comes from our experiences and senses. And Rationalists believe that knowledge is from reasoning and their minds.

I personally think knowledge comes from both experience and mind. However this may still be a pair of glasses, still affecting what we are seeing. Through the red tinted glasses experiment, Sophie cannot say the world is red, as Sophie knew she had the red tinted glasses on. Similarly we may say the world is what we see, but we may not be aware that we are wearing a pair of tinted glasses of our very own. In this case, these are the “glasses of reasoning”; we tend to filter what we see using our knowledge.

An example would be my grandma used to say if you were suffering from constipation, eating oily foods like fries and chicken wings would cure it. This is from her past experience, and it seems to have worked as many other elderly say so. I think this maybe a matter of their glasses of reasoning, when I consulted a Chinese medicine doctor; he seemed to have supported the point of eating oily foods. Where as western doctors did not approve of this, as they read from books that it was not a way of curing constipation, and through their medical knowledge it seemed ridiculous. This shows how what we have experienced and education has changed our perspectives towards issues. This also supports the point of people having their very own pair of tinted glasses, in which sometimes we may not even be aware of it being there.

In conclusion, with these “glasses of reasoning”, or what ever glasses that may change our perspective and filter what we see. We cannot find what is true or not, even if it seems true to one pair of glasses it might not seem right for another. Like red may not seed red in blue tinted glasses, as to red tinted glasses.