Perceiving and Believing Discussion
Perceiving and Believing Discussion
Movie: When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
Pages: 3 to 4
Objective
To relate the material in Chapter Four, “Perceiving and Believing” to the assigned film. Your paper (3-4 pages) will consist of three sections as follows.
Introduction Paragraph (2 pts.)
Briefly summarize the film in five sentences or less.
Perceiving and Believing Discussion
Thinking (6 pts.)
What was the event that inspired the film
What caused the event
What was the response
How did different points of view include factual reports, inductive inferences, evaluative judgements
How do perceptions and beliefs of others influence awareness of our “lenses?”
Conclusion Paragraph (2 pts.)
Briefly explain how the text relates to the text in Chapter Four, “Perceiving and Believing.”
Chapter 4
Things aren’t always what they seem! This “Mae West Room” in the Salvador Dali museum illustrates the complex and surprising nature of the process of perceiving and making sense of our world. How do we develop clear and accurate perceptions of the world that are not biased or slanted toward one perspective?
david pearson/Alamy Stock Photo
© 2019 Cengage
Thinking is how you make sense of the world. By thinking in an active, purposeful, and organized way, you are able to solve problems, work toward your goals, analyze issues, and make decisions. Your experience of the world comes to you by means of your senses: sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste. These senses are your bridges to the world, making you aware of what occurs outside you; the process of becoming aware of your world through your senses is known as perceiving.
In this chapter, you will explore the way your perceiving process operates, how your perceptions lead to the construction of your beliefs about the world, and how both your perceptions and your beliefs relate to your ability to think effectively. In particular, you will discover the way you shape your personal experience by actively selecting, organizing, and interpreting the sensations provided by the senses. In a way, each of us views the world through a pair of individual “eyeglasses” or “lenses” that reflect our past experiences and unique personalities. As a critical thinker, you want to become aware of the nature of your own lenses to help eliminate any bias or distortion they may be causing. You also want to become aware of the lenses of others so that you can better understand why they view things the way they do.
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At almost every waking moment of your life, your senses are being bombarded by a tremendous number of stimuli: images to see, noises to hear, odors to smell, textures to feel, and flavors to taste. The experience of all these sensations at once creates what the nineteenth-century American philosopher William James called “a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion.” Yet to us, the world usually seems much more orderly and understandable. Why is this so?
In the first place, your sense equipment can receive sensations only within certain limited ranges. For example, animals can detect many sounds and smells that you cannot because their sense organs have broader ranges than yours do. Perceiving and Believing Discussion
A second reason you can handle this sensory bombardment is that from the stimulation available, you select only a small amount on which to focus your attention. To demonstrate this, try the following exercise. Concentrate on what you can see, ignoring your other senses for the moment. Focus on sensations that you were not previously aware of and then answer the first question. Concentrate on each of your other senses in turn, following the same procedure.
1. What can you see? (e.g., the shape of the letters on the page, the design of the clothing on your arm)
2. What can you hear? (e.g., the hum of the air conditioner, the rustling of a page)
3. What can you feel? (e.g., the pressure of the clothes against your skin, the texture of the page, the keyboard against your fingers)
4. What can you smell? (e.g., the perfume or cologne someone is wearing, the odor of stale cigarette smoke)
5. What can you taste? (e.g., the aftereffects of your last meal)
Compare your responses with those of the other students in the class. Do your classmates perceive sensations that differ from the ones you perceived? If so, how do you explain these differences?
As you perform this simple exercise, it should become clear that for every sensation you focus your attention on, countless other sensations are simply ignored. If you were aware of everything that is happening at every moment, you would be completely overwhelmed. By selecting certain sensations, you are able to make sense of your world in a relatively orderly way. The activity of using your senses to experience and make sense of your world is known as perceiving .
Actively Selecting, Organizing, and Interpreting Sensations
It is tempting to think that your senses simply record what is happening out in the world, as if you were a human camera or tape recorder. You are not, however, a passive receiver of information, a “container” into which sense experience is poured. Instead, you are an active participant who is always trying to understand the sensations you are encountering. As you perceive your world, your experience is the result of combining the sensations you are having with the way you understand these sensations. For example, examine the following collection of markings. What do you see?
© 2019 Cengage
If all you see is a collection of black spots, try looking at the group sideways. After a while, you will probably perceive a familiar animal.
From this example, you can see that when you perceive the world, you do more than simply record what your senses experience. You are also actively making sense of these sensations. That is why this collection of black spots suddenly became the figure of an animal—you were able to actively organize these spots into a pattern you recognized.
When you actively perceive the sensations you are experiencing, you are engaged in three distinct activities:
1. Selecting certain sensations to pay attention to
2. Organizing these sensations into a design or pattern
3. Interpreting what this design or pattern means to you
In the case of the figure , you were able to perceive an animal because you selected certain of the markings to concentrate on, organized these markings into a pattern, and interpreted this pattern as representing a familiar animal.
Of course, when you perceive, these three operations of selecting, organizing, and interpreting are usually performed quickly, automatically, and often simultaneously. Also, you are normally unaware that you are performing these operations because they are so rapid and automatic. This chapter is designed to help you slow down this normally automatic process of perceiving so that you can understand how the process works.
Let’s explore more examples that illustrate how you actively select, organize, and interpret your perceptions of the world. Carefully examine the following figure.
Perceiving and Believing Discussion
Mary Evans Picture Library
Do you see both the young woman and the old woman? If you do, try switching back and forth between the two images. As you switch back and forth, notice how, for each image, you
· Select certain lines, shapes, and shadings on which to focus your attention
· Organize these lines, shapes, and shadings into different patterns
· Interpret these patterns as representing things that you are able to recognize—a hat, a nose, a chin
Another way to become aware of your active participation in perceiving your world is to consider how you see objects. Examine the illustration that follows. Do you perceive different-sized people or the same-sized people at different distances?
© 2019 Cengage
When you see someone who is far away, you usually do not perceive a tiny person. Instead, you perceive a normal-sized person who is far away from you. Your experience in the world has enabled you to discover that the farther the things are from you, the smaller they look. The moon in the night sky appears about the size of a quarter, yet you perceive it as being considerably larger. As you look down a long stretch of railroad tracks or gaze up at a tall building, the boundary lines seem to come together. Even though these images are what your eyes “see,” however, you do not usually perceive the tracks as meeting or the building as coming to a point. Instead, your mind actively organizes and interprets a world comprising constant shapes and sizes, even though the images you actually see usually vary, depending on how far you are from them and the angle from which you are looking at them.
In short, your mind actively participates in the way you perceive the world. By combining the sensations you receive with the way your mind selects, organizes, and interprets these sensations, you perceive a world of things that is stable and familiar, a world that usually makes sense to you.
The process of perceiving takes place at a variety of different levels. At the most basic level, the concept of “perceiving” refers to the selection, organization, and interpretation of sensations—for example, being able to perceive the various objects in your experience, such as a basketball. However, you also perceive larger patterns of meaning at more complex levels, as when you are watching the actions of a group of people engaged in a basketball game. Although these are very different contexts, both engage you in the process of actively selecting, organizing, and interpreting what is experienced by your senses—in other words, “perceiving.” Perceiving and Believing Discussion
