Prescribed Title #7

“We see and understand things not as they are but as we are.” Discuss this claim in relation to at least

two ways of knowing.

They way we see and understand things are not actually based on the way they are, but we see and understand things based on the way we are. This means that we use two of our ways of knowing, perception and emotion, to see things differently than they might actually be.

Sometimes, when we perceive an event, our own personal biased comes into what we believe to be happening, and takes precedence on how we interpret this event. Often past behaviors are a reason why our perception in influenced. For example, I have a lot of guy friends, and I'm used to them like pushing me playfully, or punching me on the shoulder, just in a friendly, platonic, non-romantic sort of way. This means that if I made a new guy friend, and he had feelings for me, and tried to express his feelings for me by touching me more than he normally would, such as pushing me playfully, or punching me lightly on the shoulder, I would not be able to understand the way he was expressing himself, because of my own biased, perceiving something differently than what was actually there. I understood, or rather misunderstood, something based on the way I am, rather on the way it actually is.

Emotion can often play into the way we see or understand things based on who we are rather, than the way things actually are. I am usually a pretty happy person. This does not mean that I always see things through rose-colored glasses, but I am more likely to assume that people appear happier than they actually are, because of my own emotion. Unless I have Apriori knowledge, where maybe Person X is a generally grumpy person, I might have difficulty distinguishing between someone who is actually happy, and someone who is only pretending to be happy This would be if I didn't know them and saw them in the hallway at school, or in some other public forum, because I generally consider myself to be a perceptive person. Therefore if my own emotion, of general happiness, changes the way I understand and see some things, because of the way I am, not because of the way they are.