Should we trust our senses to give us the truth?

Trusting our senses is how most people are able to function every day. They place trust in that what they are perceiving to be, is true. There are many people who use corrective measures to enable their senses to give them the truth. Glasses for poor eyesight and cochlea implants for poor hearing are the most common methods that people use to correct their senses. This variability between senses and people leads to the question of whether truth can be generalized to a population where no two people are alike, or if the search for a ‘perfect’ set of senses is possible. There is also the question of what is truth, in the sense of the knower. Is truth a grand concept that is immovable and permanent? Or is it personal to each individual and only perceivable by them? Trust is the third aspect of this question as it can only be assessed on a personal basis and can be an emotional response or a reasoned outcome to justified information. The discussion of these three aspects will give a suggestion to the extent to which people should trust their senses.

Corrective measures may alter our senses to a standard, but when our senses have been deemed normal by society’s standards there is still the question of whether we should trust them. Frédéric Brochet was a cognitive neuroscience researcher at the University of Bordeaux. In 1998 he invited fifty four specialists to taste some wines and write down their impressions. The specialists thought they were just tasting some wine, little did they know that they were the subjects in an experiments to find out whether connoisseurs can tell the difference between red and white wine. Unbeknownst to the specialists, the second set of wines that they tasted, a red and a white, were identical. Brochet had simply added flavourless food colouring to the white wine to create a faux red. Their descriptions of the dyed white read exactly like descriptions of a red wine. Brochet found that ironically, the more highly trained a wine drinker is, the more likely they’ll fall for the red-dye-in-white-wine trick. This is because connoisseurs are highly conditioned to expect a red-coloured wine to taste a certain way. This experiment clearly shows an example where our senses have failed us. It is most probable though, that the wine connoisseurs fell victim to schema theory, a theory in psychology that refers to a cognitive theory about expectations we have as to what will happen because of prior knowledge. Their schema for red wine overrode what their sense of taste was informing them and they misinterpreted what the wine tasted like.

The truth that these wine connoisseurs were eventually exposed to was that the wine they thought originally as a red was actually a white. That does not mean however, that when they tasted the wine, the ‘red’ was a white. They believed that the faux red was a true red and thus, that was their truth. In that case, the truth present was individual, even though the greater truth would eventually disprove the individual truths. For both cases, belief in their truths was justified and relevant to the information available at the time. This type of justification implies that truth is variable and relative. It can change and adapt to its circumstances. This variability also implies that truth is personal, because reality is the view of the world within given parameters and truth is what is proven to be accurate and correct within those parameters, so as every person perceives the reality to be different from the next person due to the different parameters they have of reality, truth is therefore personal. This definition of a personal truth relates to the topic because our senses give us information about reality that is true for us. This would in turn mean that we should absolutely trust our senses to give us truth because everything that our senses inform us about reality would be true for us.

The problem with this type of truth is that to function as a society, there needs to be a common truth so that the perceptions of the individuals of a society can coalesce and move forward to a common goal. This societal truth is the reason that there is mistrust for our senses. The comparisons between senses means that if there is a person who is able to perceive their reality with a precision that is more accurate than another’s, their truth is what society will use. This prioritising of truth leads to a mistrust in the truth that the other person has of reality. The introduction of glasses and cochlear implants are examples of when society rejects the truth of the individual and seeks to alter it so that it matches society’s truth.

The extent to which our senses give us truth is therefore absolute however, the extent to which we should trust our senses is relative to society’s standards of truth. Group consensus of truth justifies the collective experience of truth and the trust that people place in it. The group consensus however, is dependable upon the individuals within that society. This means that we should trust our senses to give us our truth, but that we should trust society to give us the collective truth.