It is My Perception that I Know this Essay is About Perception and Knowledge, Care to Confirm?

Perceiving and knowing each play a vital role in our interaction with one’s environment. Perception is determined by a person’s point of view and personal bias. The way one perceives the people and events in his or her life is heavily skewed by the conditions that he or she desires. Many people may observe the same event; however, this event is different to each person who witnesses it. Each person’s perspective alters their understanding of the event’s causation and significance. An example would be a fight between two best friends. To a friend of both of them, the fight is just a minor disagreement that is all the cause of one of the friends caring too much about something insignificant. On the other hand, to an adult who knows the students well, the fight is indicative of a growing anxiety between friends as they try to reconcile the idea of leaving each other to go off with college with the closeness and history of their relationship. The adult has both a great deal of experience and a much wider perspective than the friend of the two quarreling.

Perception determines one’s emotional experience of life. Many of the emotional battles people fight are a cause of this variance in emotional experiences. Often people will believe that the person they are arguing with has done something consciously wrong or been negligent when in reality the issue is not that the person did something wrong but that the other person’s understanding of what they should have done is different. It is also common that a person will blame another for not planning ahead when in reality the other person did. The disagreement is really what each of them perceive as preparation and the time interval required before an event to “plan ahead.” The two people in the dispute may waste hours of time and temporarily weaken their relationship arguing because they cannot distinguish the underlying cause. Both of these instances are key examples of the common confusion between perception and knowledge.

Knowledge is based on a universal understanding of an event, object, or person. It requires a much larger and more objective perspective than perception. This does not mean that knowledge is absolute. In fact, it is not uncommon that what one may recognize as fact today may be refuted tomorrow. However, what is important is that the idea that was recognized as fact was recognized as such by people from many different perspectives, both those who were positively and those who were negatively affected by the idea.

Technology has also created another way to assert the veracity of a claim. Photographic and audio recordings offer a method of proving an assertion beyond the chance of doubt even when there is a large opposition to that allegation. However, with the development of this technology has come the growth of a way to corrupt it. Movies, photographs, and other recordings have little reliability by themselves. One must be very cautious of this evidence, because just as a person’s perception, this source alone represents only one perspective and can be affected by bias. On the other hand, when provided by multiple sources from varying backgrounds and combined with statements from each side of an issue, technology can prove a declaration when only people’s words could not. An example of such a case is the holocaust. While there is a large faction of people who declare an atrocity of this magnitude did not occur, there is enough media and first hand experiences to prove the significance of this event.

The confusion between perception and knowledge lies in many people’s inability to distinguish between a narrow perspective and a universal perspective. This weakness is extremely common in high schools where everyone is young and inexperienced and many have not been outside of their present community. However, even whole cultures are guilty of this mistake. This is because belief, conviction in one’s perception, is so tied into emotion and ego. Many times one interprets an argument against his or her perception as an attack against his or her reliability and honesty. In reality everyone’s memory is unreliable. When one feels attacked, his or her emotion blinds him or her from gaining a broader view of the issue which is required to objectively evaluate the veracity of the understanding at issue. An argument over the course of past events becomes a defense of one’s integrity and dignity. A song which I believe illustrates my point is Belief by John Mayer. I recommend you give it a listen, but in case you don’t, here are a few lyrics.

…Everyone believes
In how they think it ought to be
Everyone believes
And they're not going easily

Belief is a beautiful armor
But makes for the heaviest sword
Like punching under water
You never can hit who you're trying for

Some need the exhibition
And some have to know they tried
It's the chemical weapon
For the war that's raging on inside…

We're never gonna win the world
We're never gonna stop the war
We're never gonna beat this
If belief is what we're fighting for

In order to know something, one must perceive it. However, one does not need knowledge to have perception. If one knows something it is that as wide as his or her influence extends he or she has met a universal acceptance of that understanding. It is one’s perception that his or her experiences give him or her enough of a background to claim true knowledge. As far as he or she can tell their understanding is widely recognized. If one perceives something they gain an understanding through his or her own perspective or that of another. This small viewpoint does not require a worldwide acceptance and so therefore does not necessitate knowledge. As I explained above, it is the mixing of many congruent perceptions from diverse standpoints that creates knowledge.

Earlier I discussed the different ways of knowing and briefly mentioned the advantages of one based in technology, but I did not focus on the ranking of each way of knowing. The “best” way of knowing, is scientifically. It isn’t that scientific knowledge is superior in importance to any other knowledge, but that with this type of comprehension we have the ability to replicate an outcome many times under very controlled conditions. No other problem is exactly replicable in this way. The “next best” way of knowing is with direct evidence. When evidence is able to be replayed or reviewed such as film, photography, documents, digital information and other recordings and combined with first hand accounts from many sides of the issue, it creates a very strong supporting case for an assertion. To prove the assertion wrong one would have to show not only how the evidence was manufactured or altered but also how each person’s point of view was either biased or incomplete. The “worst” way of knowing, but the most common in daily life, is knowledge gained by the combination of many varying and contrasting perspectives that are all in agreement. Here an understanding is confirmed by both sides of an issue which greatly eliminates the chance for bias altering the comprehension of an issue. This is easier to prove wrong than the other two ways of knowing because the only proof is people’s words. If you can create doubt around one person’s word who confirmed the understanding you create distrust in every confirming subject.

To conclude, one must never assume that his or her perception is fact, perception and knowledge are not one in the same. One must recognize the different factors which influence not only his or her own perspective but also the perspective of others. He or she must never allow his or her conviction in something to become absolute. However, this is not to suggest that one should allow his or herself to become gullible and irresolute but the previous sentence means that one must recognize there are more sides to an issue than just his or her own.