Is Seeing Really Believing?

We trust our eyes, but should we? This episode dives into the philosophy of perception, exploring whether seeing really is believing—or if our senses deceive us more often than we think. We break down Descartes' Wax Argument and why he doubted the reliability of perception, examine Gettier's famous counterexamples that challenge what it means to know something, and explore Kant's Transcendental Idealism, which suggests that reality as we perceive it is shaped by the mind itself. From optical illusions to deepfake technology, we ask: Can we ever truly know the world, or are we just interpreting shadows on the wall?

 is seeing believing, philosophy of perception, Descartes wax argument, Gettier problem, Kant transcendental idealism, epistemology and truth, perception vs reality, illusion vs knowledge, how do we know what’s real, philosophy podcast.

Transcript

Imagine you're lost, hiking deep in the deserts of Southern California. It's now been almost a day since your last sip of water. Gazing out over the vast sunbaked landscape, you see on the horizon what looks like a shimmering pool of cool and inviting water. You start heading towards it as quickly as you dare, but as you get closer, the lake seems to remain in the distance, always in front of you. No matter how far you shuffle onward, the lake is always receding into the horizon. Obviously, we're talking about a mirage. You only believe the lake was there because it looked like water. But if seeing is believing, then what does a mirage mean for our idea of truth? In other words, if your senses can be tricked, how reliable are they really? If our senses can mislead us in the desert, how much should we trust them to show us reality in our everyday life? In short, if seeing isn't believeing, then what is? Welcome back to American Socrates. I'm your host, Charles M. Rupert. Today, we're diving into the question that's puzzled thinkers for centuries. Can we truly know things through our senses? Our world is full of s sights, sounds, smells, and textures that shape our understanding of reality. But do our senses give us truth? And if they can be deceived, what does that leave of our knowledge? This question relates to what philosophers call empiricism, the idea that knowledge is grounded in sensory experience. To understand this better, we'll look at some classic arguments in favor of it, explore some famous critiques, like Baz of Descartes, and examine real-world examples of how our senses both have help and sometimes trick us. So hopefully, we'll know a little better whether the path to knowledge runs through our senses or if we need something more to truly understand the world around us. Let's kick things off by thinking about how we first start seeing the world. You open your eyes in the morning and look out your bedroom window to see a pink-hued sky with golden clouds lazily drifting by. Those clouds must be there in the sky, right? But how do we know? Well, because we see them. It's pretty simple. You see them, they are there. Why are you making this complicated, Mr. Philosopher? If you can see something, it's got to be there. What you see is what you get. This idea in philosophy is called direct realism, or some call it naive realism. It's the notion that our senses give us a direct and unfiltered picture of reality. You ever notice, though, how babies just don't know anything when they're born? They don't come out preloaded with useful information. They aren't speaking the king's English on day one or even very vaguely aware that something like fire is hot. They have to learn it all. That's exactly what John Locke was talking about with his idea of the tabula rasa, or the blanket slate. Babies are born without any information in their heads. They come out as a blank slate ready to be filled. He said, We don't come into the world with this built-in knowledge. We come into the world like empty books so that everything we know can be written into them, that we can learn from our experience. And that's what fills us up with knowledge. You don't just know how to do a job. You learn it by seeing and hearing and practicing. Same with everything else in life. You don't understand fire until you feel the heat. You don't master a trade without getting your hands a little dirty. That's the idea behind empiricism. Knowledge doesn't come from sitting around and thinking. It comes from living. And more explicitly, it comes from your senses as you experience them. Locke's idea of itsiricism, in short, is that knowledge isn't something we're born with. It's something that we gather through our senses. So every skill we have, every fact we know, they all come from this. You don't learn to fix a pipe right by sitting in a room and thinking about it. You learn by watching someone else do it, maybe, or practice doing it yourself. You learn from making mistakes. For luck, reason helps us organize what we've learned, but it all starts with our senses. Without that, we've got nothing. But if this is the case, how do we explain certain experiences, like optical illusions? If I see a person disappear, do they really disappear? Or is it that sometimes we think we're seeing something that's not actually there or mistake one thing for something else? If direct realism was the ultimate truth, illusions would seemingly be impossible. So maybe it's not as simple as direct realism. Maybe seeing shouldn't exactly be believing. Renee Descartes famously asked, how do we know what we claim to know? People claim to know all kinds of things. Some of them do, and some of them don't, but think they do. Descartes wants to know of all the beliefs that he calls knowledge, which ones does he actually know for sure? For certain. He thought a lot about this issue, and it troubled him greatly for most of his young life. Finally, there was this one winter where there was a lull in combat during a war he was fighting for the King of France. And he decided it was time to sit down and just figure all of this out. In his meditations, which is the book, that he produced as a result of this winter-long think, he pointed out that much of what we believe comes from our senses. If you think about it, everything that we learn through experience depends on observation. Even if it's secondhand, like watching a video on YouTube or reading a book, you still need your senses to accurately catch what it is that you're getting. So it's worth us asking, how do we know that what we observe is even real? To explore this, Descartes came up with a thought experiment involving a lump of beeswax. He took a little clump of wax and checked it out with his senses. He held it in his hand, he turned it around in his fingers. He looked at it. He sniffed it. He stuck out his tongue and tasted it. He even flicked it with one of his fingers to see what sort of sound it emitted. He found that the wax had all sorts of properties that he could identify using his senses. It was solid. It had a certain shape. It had a faint floral smell, a slight taste of honey, right? When he thumped it with his finger, it made some kind of dull sound. It was cool to the touch, easy to hold, and soft. All of these sensory details were part of how he recognized this stuff that was in his hand to be beeswax. In other words, we know this is beeswax. Why? Because it has all these properties that we generally associate with beeswax. But then he did something interesting. Descartes put the wax in a cup and placed it near the fire in his bedroom. Naturally, the wax began to melt. Examining it again a few minutes later, he noted all the changes. The color had changed. The shape had dissolved. The smell had faded away. The taste was extinguished. You couldn't hold it in your hands anymore. You couldn't thump it and make a sound. All of those sensory traits that he had used to recognize this stuff as wax were now gone in just a few minutes. How could he be sure, then, that this was even the same stuff that he had known through his senses earlier than all these different properties? So Descartes asked himself, if everything about the wax's appearance had changed, how do I know it's even the same wax at all? If we're relying on what we see and smell and hear, we might think it was something else entirely. Sure. We could say, look, we watched it change. We know that it's still the same wax. But what if we hadn't? What if we hadn't seen it melt? What if you just walked out of the room right before it melted only to return afterwards? Would you believe that this hot, fragrance-free liquid in this cup was this same cool, soft little lump of beeswax? Well, maybe, but only if you'd already had experience with beeswax melting before. Imagine you're a child who's never seen beeswax melt. Didn't even know beeswax could melt. Well, you might think that you were looking at two different things with vastly distinct properties. For Descartes, this meant our senses can't fully capture what something is. We get impressions of things, but to truly recognize the wax as wax, he says, we need our mind, what he calls the mind alone, to grasp the essence of it. This wax argument, as it's called, suggests that senses give us pieces of information, but they don't reveal an object's true nature. Descartes thought that because our minds can understand things in ways that our senses can't, so sensory knowledge, it's limited. It's good for impressions, but maybe not for true understanding. It's not enough, then to simply see. We need to be able to apprehend to know something. And this requires a larger set of experiences than just what our immediate senses tell us. Descartes admitted that some properties of the way wax did, of course, remain, such as the wax existence in three-dimensional space, but he employed more arguments later on in his meditations to dismiss even these sensory determinations. Eric Frome once said that someone who thinks their first impression of the world, you know, the one that they get straight from their senses, is the absolute truth, is as actually a bit like a person in a fantasy of their own making. Both are missing the deeper reality operating beneath the surface. Like watching an unmoored ship drift about on an unseen current and coming to the false conclusion that the boat seemingly has a will of its own. So direct realism, too might give us a start, but as From says, stopping here would leave us kind of delusional. We'd be a neurotic who builds their own world entirely in their head. But if we can't rely on senses alone, maybe it's time to think about what it actually means to know something. A major idea in epistemology, which is the branch of philosophy to devoted to the study of knowledge, is that knowledge is really our word for justified, true belief. This means to truly know something, you have to first of all believe it, and then have a good reason for believing it. And, of course, it must be true in the sense that you're not making a, say, reasonable mistake. Another way to say this is that you can't know something if that's false or wrong. And you can't know it if you have no reason to believe it. So you need both of these things to call a belief knowledge. Say you believe it'll rain tomorrow, right? Tomorrow morning before work, it's going to rain. When you wake up and it's actually raining, we wouldn't say that you knew that it was going to rain beforehand if you had no good reason to expect it. Just having a belief that happens to be true doesn't mean you know something. Knowledge can't be just a matter of getting lucky. But say you checked the barometer the night before or had that old ache in your knee, the one that always comes before a storm. Now you have some kind of justification for your belief. And since it did actually rain, we could say that it was going to rain and that you knew it. Hence, a justified true belief is knowledge, right? Well, sort of. Let me introduce you to the ideas of one Edmund Gettier. In what has to be the world's shortest tenure-granting paper, he comes up with a couple of scenarios where you can have a belief that's justified and true, but still we'd be reluctant to call it knowledge. For example, imagine at 2 p.m., you look up at a clock showing it's at 2 o'clock. You're justified that to believe that it's 2 p.m because you looked at the clock and it really is 2 p.m. And so you have a justified true belief, and that should mean knowledge. But let's say the clock stopped running exactly 24 hours ago, so that it just happens to be showing the correct time on the face by pure coincidence. You didn't know that, and so your justification here seems a little wonky. And yet, it is still a justification that points to a true belief. This wonkiness is enough, Gettier argues, to make us hesitant to call your justified true belief knowledge. Your belief was justified. It made sense based on the clock face, and it turned out it was true. It really was 2 p.m. But did you really know that that was the time? Your belief wasn't based on accurate current information. And so there seemed to be a disconnect between your reasoning and your awareness of reality. Obviously, such counterexamples are rare. The clock would be wrong every second of the day, except for in two incidents. But an exception to the rule here disqualifies it as the definition of knowledge. We can't define knowledge as justified true to belief most of the time, but not all of the time. Because then we would never know if we were dealing with one of the exceptions or the rule. So knowledge can't simply be justified true belief. This leads us to a bigger question. How do we know if our belief is justified anyway? For justification, we need a lot of background knowledge. For instance, we'd need to know how a clock works, how to read the face of it, and whether a specific clock was reliable or not. Without this context, we wouldn't be justified in claiming to know the time. But then, that background knowledge would require its own justification, which we would need more background knowledge to justify it. And so on and so forth, until we get to what philosophers call an infinite regress, where we need omniscience. We need all knowing, all understanding of the entire workings of the universe, or we could never arrive at any knowledge at all. Perhaps one solution here would be to jettison the need for truth, since we can't get rid of the need for justification. Why not say knowledge is simply justified belief? The problem here is that then you could claim to know things that aren't in fact real. Like, if you had a good reason to believe in unicorns, you could say that you know unicorns exist when they don't. And that doesn't seem like the kind of thing that we want from our idea of knowledge. So, where does this leave us? It raises questions about whether we can ever really know things based on senses alone, or if we need some sort of stronger foundation for knowledge. Before we're too quick to simply jettison empiricism here and cling to this straw of rationalist alternatives, we should keep in mind that empiricism is a foundational assumption of modern science, whose success seemingly justifies this assumption. But if the senses are not reliable, then all of science is unreliable. So are Descartes' ideas maybe an unnecessary worry? Or is Gettier's counterexample just needless criticism of a needless definition? Yes, Descartes makes us doubt our senses and Gettier questions our ideas of justified true belief. But together, they bring us pretty close to skepticism. That is the idea that maybe we can't really know anything at all. Now, Emmanuel Kant, a philosopher who tried to bring both reason and sensory experience into a single system, might offer us a way out of this sort of skeptical spiral. Kant argued that while knowledge begins with sensory experience, it doesn't stop there. He believed that our minds play an active role in organizing and interpreting what we sense. So for Kant, there's a middle ground. We experience the world through our senses, but we structure and make sense of it with our minds. He called this approach transcendental idealism. It's tricky to explain without direct experience of it, but maybe think of one of those magic eye computer-generated images where you're supposed to like relax your eyes and let your vision sort of look through the picture, focusing just right, like behind the image. And if you do this correctly, a 3D image will appear. Transcendental idealism works maybe a bit like that. Your senses are collecting data from the world, but it's just a bunch of noise. It's lights and dark shape, color, nothing really recognizable yet. To actually see or know what it is that you're looking at, your mind has to organize that data into patterns and constructions, which we ultimately call concepts. Certain br brain conditions, like blindsidedness, give us a sense of how this works. People with blind have damage in the occipital lobe of their brains, that is the back of the brain where the visual information is processed. So these people don't consciously see anything. They're effectively blind. But their eyes still function just fine, and they're still connected to their brain. So if you toss a blind-sided person a baseball, they could catch it out of midair. But if you held up a baseball in the air and asked them to tell you what it was you had in your hand, they wouldn't be able to because they aren't consciously experiencing the their own sight. So this condition suggests that it's possible for us to sense something without experiencing it. Actually, we do this all the time in what's known as a flow state. You ever been in that zone where you're like driving, but you're thinking about everything in the world, you know, everything from like your dinner plans to your favorite song on the radio to the latest time you made a social faux pas, everything except the road itself. You're missing the stoplights, the other vehicles, all of that stuff. But the next thing you know, you've arrived at your destination, safe and sound, and you have virtually no memory of how you got there. Surely, you must have seen the stoplights. You must have seen the other cars and things, right? You must have executed turns. You must have stopped at red lights and navigated construction zones, avoiding squirrels and cops. But you don't remember any of it. So how do you know you saw it? That's sort of what it's like in this flow state, in this blindsided sort of way. You experienced all this stuff. You were able to take action, but you don't remember really experiencing it. You can't recall doing it. You can't describe if you saw this vehicle or didn't see this vehicle; none of that exists for you. So to make this a little more concrete, imagine you're looking at a coffee mug. The shape, color, and weight are all things that you can sense directly. But to understand all of these things as a mug, as a tool for holding coffee, you know, and something that could break if it was drops, you need a certain concept and a certain mental structure. Your mind organizes all this raw sensory data so that it makes sense to you. Kant calls these mental pictures a priori concepts, like cause and effect or space and time. A priori here is Latin and simply means before experience, as in, you know without using your senses. Think of these kinds of concepts as a framework our minds used to interpret sensory information. This is why, when you look at a forest, you don't just see a bunch of scattered colors and shapes and shadows. What you see are trees and leaves and grass and so on. You're organizing that picture as you see it. Your mind is doing it unconsciously for you because you already have those concepts. You have the concept of a tree. You have the concept of grass. So on and so forth. According to the content, real knowledge isn't just raw data from our senses. Nor is it really pure reason alone. It's a blend of both, where our minds shape sensory experience in ways that make the world meaningful. So while we can get knowledge from our senses, that knowledge is always filtered and shaped by these mental frameworks. A lot of this processing happens entirely without our realizing it, and it's never perfect. But this imperfect knowledge isn't the same as having no knowledge at all. We should note that this transcendental activity is where things like bias and prejudice ultimately enter into our understandings. It doesn't feel like prejudice to us, because it's so ingrained in us that we're literally organizing the world we see around those kinds of concepts. And so it just seems like we're seeing what's there in the world. So it doesn't look like bias or prejudice. It just looks like the way the world is. Getting rid of bias, then, is really hard because it's like a habit of the mind. And that habit can be well worn into place. Kant's move is to show us that we need both these mental concepts and sensory experience to really know something. He points out that our knowledge is always shaped by the structure of our minds. This also means that the more you know, the more you can understand. And therefore, the more you can experience. You can live in a richer world than other people by simply knowing more. You can see things that they can't see. You can have deeper insights than someone who doesn't have those mental structures. You can, and I do mean this literally, see things in the world that others just can't imagine, even though they're looking right at them in broad daylight, right in front of their eyes. For example, knowing the history of and the stories around a work of art is what makes the difference between a museum trip where you look at pigment on canvas and one where you see art. I can walk around the Philadelphia Art Museum and see things that you don't, even when we're looking at the same painting. So if mirages can trick our vision, so can this transcendental failure blind us to the structures and patterns all around us, that we're all witnessing, but not all of us are comprehending. This is why two people can witness the same event, and one might call it racist, but the other one would say, no, it's not. One can see the connections, and the other simply can't. This is not to suggest that both perspectives here are right. This is to suggest that one person is missing crucial information in their judgment. I like to tell my students that this is really the point of education. It's all well and good to go get a degree that leads to a job and you make more money. But seeing the world with deeper eyes, not not having to be afraid of the future because you can understand the patterns, being able to enjoy life's greatest pleasures because you can understand them and a appreciate them, having deep and strong relationships that don't constantly end in fights or some kind of silent resentment because you understand the connections between yourself and these other people, these are what you're paying for when you pay for an education. As I said in an earlier episode, education is about you, you in your way of seeing and comprehending the world. So, can we fully know the real world? Well, not entirely, even according to Kant. We know it as it appears to us, filtered through our minds. This opens up a whole new way of thinking about what it means to know anything at all. There are appearances and there are things in themselves for Kant. And those things in themselves are just beyond our reach. But suffice it to say that our limited human understanding is sufficient. It's enough to make a rich and fulfilling life possible for all of us. So what do you think? Is knowledge something we can trust from our senses? Or is it always shaped by the lens of our minds? If you're curious to dig deeper or have questions, I'd like to hear from you. Reach out, share your thoughts with me, or challenge some of these ideas, because philosophy grows best when it's shared. Descartes and Gedier push us to question how much we can really trust our senses and our idea of knowledge as justified true belief, which leads us towards a kind of skepticism. But Kant has offered us this sort of middle ground. Sure, our knowledge starts with sensory experience, like Locke said, but our minds are active. They're doing a lot of heavy lifting here to organize and interpret that information long before we become consciously aware of what it is we're seeing. That's his transcendental idealism. So while we can't fully know the world as it exactly is, we do know it through the lens of our own mind. Thanks for listening to American Socrates. If you found today's episode interesting, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone you think might also love a little wisdom in their life. Join us next week as we explore the world of gender and sex by examining the question, is sex biologically determined?