journal 2

2/23/2013

5 Comments

 
“By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in
solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and,
except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable.”
• What is the
role of culture and language in the perceptual process? Given the partially
subjective nature of sense perception, how can different knowers ever agree on
what is perceived? Do people with different cultural or linguistic backgrounds
live, in some sense, in different worlds?
5 Comments
Minh Anh Nguyen
2/23/2013 09:43:55 am

Culture is one of origin of knowledge. In culture, language is a big difference in
knowledge. One word but said in two countries will have many meaning. One
child might learn an other language but compare to his mother tonguehemight
view the second language is a subject he has to learn. After that even when that child
grows up and commute to foreign there could be misunderstood. Beside language,
respect might also be different. In my business class, we had studied about reasons of
airplane crashes in Korean Airline. It is not about broken engines, it because in Korea
respect the senior is very important so the officers make gaps between them and the
captains. So when something wrong happen they only give hints to the captain, the
hints is not clearly then misunderstood and the captain can not make right choices.
But in Western countries, respect is important but it is not so required when there is
an emergency. From that we can see culture and language play a major role in
creating perceptual process. It is not only affect to perceptual process it sets up
perceptual process.

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Fernanda Albo
2/23/2013 12:54:36 pm

What is perception? Perception on it's own, is the way that we response to our environment, or the way that we learn how to response to it. That is why culture is so important to the way we see things, because we already have a prejudice or a basic knowledge of them, and with that, we form a conclusion or a belief. Since we are little we hear some opinions that we make our own.
Language is important as well because you have to use the appropiate one in order to communicate an idea, or to understand one. If you can do this, then people with a different background will still get it, but they won't have the same opinion. By listening to others, and looking at different perspectives, the diversity of background is not important, because each one has a judgement of their own.

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Pavel Strembovskiy
2/24/2013 12:30:56 am

The way people explore the world is very much similar for everyone but the way people perceive what they explore is different. This is only because every human has its own mind, its own brain like an engine, which gives "inner roots" for comprehension, orientation and forming of attitudes with evaluation. The influence of culture and native language plays a huge role in shaping the perceptual process as every single culture and language has its own "roots" of what is true or false and how it is defined. So, basically saying, different persons from different countries will define knowledge in different ways: somewhere there will coincidences and somewhere there will be distinctions as from the early ages their perceptions are cemented by "roots".
In mind opinion there is only one real world existing, world where all live, but humans are tend to create their artistic and imaginative worlds based on specific stereotypes, motives, prejudices and etc, that is called the diversity of senses or individual perception.

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Karoline
2/25/2013 12:01:35 am

Our senses are our basic tool of understanding. By interoperating what we sense, we determine what we see and know, through our own perception. Our perceptions are different, and depend on each individual person. They can be defined by different factors, some by our culture and language, some by our beliefs and opinions; it all differs from person to person. Language can impact what we sense as the same thing can mean different things in different cultures and languages. Take color as an example; the color red in Europe it is the color of romance, love and passion, while orange is the color for love in several countries in Asia. This is formed by culture and language, as this is a common perception in this country. That meaning of the color is significant for them in this way no matter the belief or meaning of other countries. This doesn’t not though, by any means, means that they life in different worlds. Yes, some people may have perceptions to the extreme, which may cause a bigger difference from the common world, in a form of way living in their own world. But these people tend to “create” their own world by how they percept. Senses define us, and are defined by many different factors, which differ us from eachother.

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Sy Quang Minh Truong (sam)
2/25/2013 12:03:09 am

The given quotation involved in the process of understanding our surrounding world or should I say, our own surrounding worlds because according to the quotation, we perceive knowledge and understanding through personal sense so that the world that we perceive should reflect something that an individual will have but not a society.
Despite the fact, we can perfectly communicate with each other through language. Such thing happens (we have ourselves existed in our own world and the common world) because of three reasons:
Common knowledge:
There are some knowledge and perspectives that are accepted as both by an individual and society such as the Earth is round, when we drop something, it will fall to the ground due to gravitational force, those are our basic common understanding and are accepted as a group because they are obvious.
Cultural reason:
The second reason is that because of our religious belief, personal knowledge that gain over time, individual perception, cultural differences, each of us will have our own world. For example, because our country Vietnam and others like Japan and Korea, we belief in a system of order and strict rules such as bow whenever they greet, shame when they ever they drink without their hand cover their mouth, that they are likely to live with their relative and family in a same house. Western people will view those cultural facts as strange and weird, simply because those facts are not existed in THEIR WORLD.
Language and experience reason:
The third reason as well as the most important one is language. This reason can explain why we understand that we, in some sense, live in our own world (reason number two) but still viewing our self as a personnel in the society (number one reason). A strawberry appears, the sun appears bright and yellow, a tropical jungle seeing from above is appears to be green. Those of us that have “normal” color vision are probably agreed with such fact. But that does not change the fact that colors are just illusions. In fact, our brains are the one which are responsible for the creation of colors since they convert some waves of the electromagnetic spectrum into colors. That is why I can observe the color that an object has but not the color that is experienced inside your mind. So how can we know that YOUR “red” strawberry can be observed by me as YOUR “blue”, we both call it “red”, we communicate effectively not knowing how difference our internal experience were, we are alone in our own mind but still think we are a part of something bigger. Even if I use 1000 appropriate words in certain ways to describe “blue”, you will never find out if my “blue” is your “red” since you cannot experience it.
So the answer of the question:” Given the partially subjective nature of sense perception, how can different knowers ever agree on what is perceived?” is because we cannot experience other perception and language has already create a cover for our knowledge and understanding to avoid confusion when yours, in some senses, is not as same as mine. That is why we think we are in a same world.

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