#1 TOK DIARY:
“Sight is the most important sense for gaining knowledge”
In my opinion sight, indeed, is the most important sense for gaining knowledge, as it is
essential to identify various objects and to see the behaviours of humans and animals. For
example, without sight, I would not be able to identify the plants, but with the sight, I would
definitely know what it is. Last year, I was playing with my friends a game in which you had
to guess what the object was from touching it, the difficult part here was that you were
blindfolded, with a shirt so you had no idea of what you were touching. During the game, I
recognised certain things, such as a water bottle, a book and a pencil. And this was all
because I have seen them previously in my life, touching something, so thanks to sight I had
the knowledge to remember the shape of the previously mentioned objects.
However, we have now the knowledge about colourblindness, so we nowadays can not trust
our senses, as we have the example of people that are not able to see them. We think that
not be able to see the colours we “normally” see is wrong. But what would happen if we are
the ones who see the colours in the wrong way, and the colour blind people see colours the
right way? There is no way to determinate what we know compared to other people’s
knowledge. For example, a banana could be yellow for me, but other people could be
orange. We can’t trust our sight.
#2 TOK DIARY:
“Everyone should be an empiricist”
In my opinion, not everyone should be an empiricist. Not everyone should be an empiricist
because you can’t always trust your senses, for example, when you have a cold you
obviously have the nose blocked, so how do you know for sure how something smells if you
are actually smelling nothing? The answer you give is not other than your own perception of
how something smells like. Another example to prove our senses can be wrong is when
people say that they believe in God. We do not see God, we can not touch God, so how do
we know if he is even real? Some modern philosophers say, “any reference to things that
transcend the senses is cognitively meaningless since there is no evidence on which such
ideas can be either affirmed or denied” (Klocker, v-vi).
On the other hand, some people might agree that everyone should be an empiricist. Some
points they would talk about could be colours. How would you know what the colour blue
looks like if you were born blind? The only way to have the idea of blue is to experience it
with your senses, using the sight in this case.
#3 TOK DIARY:
“Visual illusions mean that we shouldn’t trust what we see”
In my opinion, I agree with the statement above, because I have recently seen a video about
an experiment and I found interesting how our brain prioritizes the information that comes
from our eyes, rather than information that our ears provide. This is because most of us are
used to trust or sight more than any other sense. This experiment the man did was related to
the “McGurk Effect”. This illusion makes what we see override what we hear, so the mouth
movements we see as we look at the face influences what we believe we are hearing. But
what if we closed our eyes? We hear the sound as it is with our eyes open. We actually see
how mouth movements influence what we are hearing. The most remarkable thing of this
