The Way We Are

The claim “We see and understand things not as they are but as we are,” suggests that when it comes to the different ways of knowing, our personal biases and differences in the way we gain knowledge, influence the very knowledge we gain. This idea is very prominent in terms of knowing by perception and knowing by reason. Both these ways of knowing can be influenced by the person exercising them and can therefore change the knowledge they are trying to gain from what is actually true.
In knowing by perception the knowledge we gain can be warped by the way in which we see the world and the fact that that may differ from how the world actually is. Our perception of the world is influenced itself by our experiences in life which have affect our thoughts about the world and how we see it. For example I may have one bad experience with a clown who scared me as a child and therefore I may perceive all clowns as being scary because of that experience even though many of them may be very kind. These experiences affect our process of taking in information from the outside world and translating it into knowledge. When we induce or deduce what we see, that process may be affected by our previous experiences with the world and it may blind us to seeing things as they really are without bias or assumptions. A possible counterclaim to this argument which could be made by someone who has not studied the effects of perception on the knowledge we gain, may be that people are clever enough to know that they are making hasty assumptions about something they see and therefore can identify and put aside their biases when obtaining knowledge. However, people often do not realize just how subtle and undetectable these biases can be and therefore do not know that they are affecting their perception of the world. For example in the online test designed to see if Americans are naturally racist, which we took in our TOK class, it was found that even though the people taking it did not think they were racist it still took them longer to categorize an African American person as good and a white person as bad than it did when they were asked to do the opposite. Their past experiences of seeing the amount of racism which once existed in America had an effect on how they perceive African Americans without them even knowing it.
In knowing by reason, the assumptions and biases again have an on the way we gain knowledge. In this case they affect the process of reasoning we go through to come to a conclusion about this knowledge and what it is. Our biases about a certain situation or matter can influence our reasoning when we are trying to determine the truth of the matter through what we already know. For example in the check exercise we did in TOK class, we tried to reason what the story of the family was through examining some of their checks and coming to conclusion about what they meant. We did not realize at the time but our previous assumption that because the family seemed wealthy they must be stable, influenced our process of reasoning by causing us to disregard some of the more unpleasant checks like the one for marriage counseling and drug rehab when drawing our conclusion. Our biases about the family affected out reasoning about what their story was from the evidence we were given. A possible counterclaim to this argument from someone who has not studied knowledge by reason could be that people do not ever make these assumptions about something they don’t know much about and therefore have nothing to influence their reasoning process when they are trying to reach a conclusion about that something. However, it is oftentimes unrealized just how many assumptions we make about a situation we only have bits and pieces of information about, and how strongly they influence us when we are trying to put those pieces together and reason a conclusion about the situation. The case of the check exercise is the perfect example of this.
This is how our personal biases and differences in the way we gain knowledge, influence the very knowledge we gain in different situations of the ways of knowing. In terms of perception, our previous experiences influence the way in which we see the world and the knowledge we gain through seeing it. Also, in terms of reason our assumptions about a situation can influence our conclusion about it and the process we use to reach that conclusion. This is what was meant by the claim “We see and understand things not as they are but as we are.”