Topics Perception

Question Are all of the senses (taste, sight, etc.) equally credible?

Accepted:
April 3, 2007

Comments

This is an excellent question, but one of the reasons it is not easy to answer is that we are not comparing like with like, because different senses give us information about different kinds of thing. It’s not like two people who tell you about astronomy where we might say that one person is more credible than the other on the same subject.

Take sight and taste. Sight seems to give more information about the external world, but in part for that very reason it is more open to error. Taste seems to give much more restricted and subjective information, and in part for that very reason it is less open to error. Having said that, however, all the senses may form the basis for inferences about what is going on in the external world, and any of these inferences may go wrong.

Another reason your question is hard is that philosophers don’t agree about what counts as the senses getting things right. Take the colors that we believe things to have on the basis of sight. Some philosophers think that our eyes do a pretty good job here; others think that this is a case where they get it wrong every time, since external objects never have colors in the way we see them. According to the anti-color lobby, what is going on in color vision is that we take our inner color experiences (which are real but entirely mental) and mistakenly project them out onto external objects.

Question Are all of the senses (taste, sight, etc.) equally credible? Accepted:April 3, 2007

Question Are all of the senses (taste, sight, etc.) equally credible?

Accepted:
April 3, 2007