Chapter 3. Perceiving and Believing
Learning Objectives
- Understand the relationship between our senses and the signals they transform and transmit
- Understand the bottom-up and top-down pathways by which perception is created
- Appreciate that sensation and perception are creative acts
- Understand the lesson of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
- Identify between Locke’s primary and secondary qualities
- Understand the distinction between Kant’s noumena versus phenomena
- Understand the role of models and how they frame and shape our interaction with the world around us
- Recognise the structure (holistic) and power of our belief systems to shape our experiences
- Understand appropriate attitudes to hold towards our beliefs and mental models.
New concepts to master
- Signal
- Top-down versus bottom-up processes
- Heuristics
- Cognitive biases
- Allegory
- Primary versus Secondary quality
- Phenomena versus noumena
- Naïve realism
- Model
- Confirmation bias
- Holism.
Chapter 3 Orientation
In this chapter, we start to venture down another rabbit hole and look closely at the – often faulty – tools we use for gathering information and forming beliefs, and also the make-up and function of these beliefs. That is to say, the instruments we’ve evolved for picking up perceptions and turning these into beliefs about the world. Everyone knows from popular perceptual illusions and magic tricks that normal everyday perception isn’t exact or very reliable, but few people understand the ways it’s vulnerable to mistakes and biases and how to manage these vulnerabilities. I hope after this chapter, you’ll be in a better place to understand this and improve the way you perceive and believe.
Chapter 2 Review
Chapter 2 gave us many new conceptual tools with which to understand and improve our thinking and evaluate claims made about the world. The last chapter definitely covered a lot of new territory, so if you were feeling a little overwhelmed, don’t worry – we’ll go back over most of it and apply it several times in later chapters.
Chapter 2 was organised into three categories. The first was theory, which focused on developing essential knowledge and conceptual tools like logic, argumentation, fallacies, biases, inferences, language analysis, critical appraisal steps (e.g. knowing what counts as a reason and what counts as evidence and how to evaluate the credibility of these), etc. The purpose of this theoretical information (even if it was a tad dry) was to equip you with necessary conceptual tools that will make you a much more skilful critical thinker. The second focus of the last chapter was application, and we went through some basic steps to practice the ‘how’ of applying the new theoretical concepts. Practice is critical to ensuring we can execute these moves when we need them. Finally, we looked at optimal dispositional traits or attitudes, and how cultivating the best attitudes, perspectives, and approaches to the world around us can maximise our critica