Situations of sensory knowledge

I wanted to see if the made up story below is a good example of a perceptual knowledge shortcoming and then strengthening of sensory knowledge.

Big Bobby gets his driver's license, hops in his car, and drives off on to the cluttered roads of Indianapolis. Happy as can be, he drives along (pretty quickly) with other traffic, avoiding the cars he can see around him. He keeps driving until he no longer has traffic around him to worry about. He approaches a blinking red/yellow stoplight with trees all around, proceeds to go into the intersection, and SMACK!!, Big Bobby gets hit by another car...

Why in the world did he get hit? Poor, hospitalized Bobby is colorblind (a special red/yellow case) and he could not tell the color of the light. He later learned that he could have known because the red light is on top and the yellow light is in the middle. Does using the Driver's Manual pictures count as a way to strengthen his sensory knowledge? or is this knowledge not relevant to the visual sensory knowledge being strengthened. Experience could be said to be the mean by which he learned his lesson, but does that tie into strengthening sensory knowledge as well. I think that Driver's Manual is the "strengthener" because, even though he hasn't fixed his colorblind problem, he knows the patterns and regulations on the stoplights set by other people so that he will not have another accident.

I also wanted to talk about the topic people were talking about at the end of class about if emotion is a way of knowing. Certainly humans develop emotions by the perceptions of our senses. But what about if there was a matured human who was sheltered from any sort of society, and was then suddenly placed into fierce combat. What would the reactions of the human be?

Gunshots (audio), wounded people (visual), immense vibrations (tactile), smoke (smell), all of these are occurrences that we can detect, but what about the human in the experiment? The human starts hiding, hands over head, looking around crazed. Where did it learn fear? I think that humans are hosts of these complicated mental phenomenon naturally, no matter what. However, our mind could experience these things so quickly that all of the phenomena are pieced together so amazingly that humans actually develop emotions subconsciously. There are always more than one possibilities for this subject. I view emotion as a natural reaction, from our senses, but not as a method of gaining knowledge.

WHAT IS EMOTION, ANYWAYS?

To answer if emotion is another way of knowing, I think the bigger question is what is emotion and how does it affect us? Is emotion relative? Do we learn emotions from others? Many churches teach us that EVERYONE has a conscience. But a terrorist may not (and probably doesn't) feel guilty about killing thousands of innocent people. I, on the other hand, would. The terrorist grew up in different surroundings and had different influences. Maybe these surroundings and influences suppressed his conscience. Therefore, reason and thinking would be above our conscience, above our "instinctive" feelings of guilt, or happiness, or anger. I don't think science even knows what emotion truly is; it IS what makes us human, and it comes from a certain part of the brain, but do nerves and cells simply control these emotions, or is it something deeper than cells and atoms?! This topic is hard--to say whether emotions are another way of knowing besides the senses, we have to know what emotions are----are they relative or not? Do we feel guilty after doing wrong because we were brought up that way, or is it something we're born with, written in our genes? My little sister cried when she was three and watching lion king for the first time. She had never experienced death and sadness, yet she was extremely upset...emotion must not be completely relative.
Emotions are obviously connected with memory--there was a research article in the Harvard magazine about why we remember random things from when we were 5, but we can't remember where we put our keys 20 minutes ago. If a memory is connected with a strong emotion, such as the fear on your first day of first grade, you can remember EVERYTHING about that day. I was 5 years old when i saw my grandma for the last time, but I remember every single detail of that 15-minute point in time. Emotions are obviously important to knowledge-but where do they originate???? That's the question I believe we have to answer before answering Mr. Perkin's question.

Senses

addressing the question asked in class today about whether knowledge can be obtained through sources other than senses, i do not believe it can. The example given by ms. libby and mr. perkins were emotional ways of knowing or spiritual ways of knowing. Many people such as this would argue that based on how they feel towards a situation(their emotion) they can "know" something or have "knowledge" of something, however this is not necessarily true. The emotion of a situation is just a result of how one may interpret the senses they have used to obtain the knowledge. In other words, the emotions sparked from an event just clarify the knowledge already obtained from the senses. For example, if a child is playing a video game that involves crime and he goes around shooting everyone in the game because thats what he must do to win, and he feels no mercy for the people on the game. why? because he has no emotional connection, however if a man shot a real person in front of this child would the child then have mercy for the dead man? of coarse he would because he saw them die and heard them after being shot. The emotion the child feels is clarification that his senses are correct, that the man is dieing or dead. Therefore emotion is not a way of obtaining knowledge, but can legitimately be used to clarify it.

the other example given was faith. A person cannot know about a faith without acquiring some kind of knowledge from ear or sight beforehand. For example, many people go on mission trips to see what needs to be done in the world or to "connect" with god. It gives them a realization based from the senses they used to understand it. Then one might ask, how do people in isolated parts of the world "know" about religion, and it can be understood that they find their god or a Christian god through other aspects of life such as nature, and feelings they encounter with other people. How do these people acquire knowledge of these feelings that lead to faith? They sense them, they see the beauty god put on earth, they might hear stories, or feel something that man could not alone have made. The emotions people have from these senses or phenomena clarify their faith.

The basis for knowing is acquiring knowledge from the senses, then interpreting what these senses have given you, then clarifying that the interpretation is true. Is emotion a base for obtaining knowledge? no, it is just one aspect that derives from the basis of your senses.

valid or invalid?

In response to today's question about how can you tell why an argument is valid or not I think distribution is key. If you look at the examples today, you can see that all the valid arguments have corresponding distributions in the premisses and the conclusion. For example,

No animals are plants.
Some animals are bugs.
Therefore some bugs are not plants.

Although untrue, this statement is valid. It's mood is EIO and has a format of 3. In the first premise, plants is distributed and in the second premise, bugs is undistributed. Looking at the conclusion, you can see that bugs is once again undistributed whereas plants remains distributed. To make a syllogism valid, the distributions must correspond between the premisses and the conclusion or it won't make sense. In the first syllogism you can't refer to all of one group and then deduce something refering to only some of that group in the conclusion. If that is done, the argument is involving different numbers from groups confusing and wrongly concluding an issue. From the saying we hear everyday: "It's not what you say, it's how you say it." This is a perfect example. In some cases, when the word order is changed, the syllogism loses its validity, even if it is the truth.

Identity

To identity an object is to rationalize the existing of that object, if this object has these features than it is that object, however, the argument that there are an infinite amount of features to idenify an object is irrelevent because we automatically include ALL the traits/features when identifying an object. however the law of identity comes into question when adjectives are used. A clump of salt for example. Although the salt has several features and therefore we could say it is this, the 'is' is pretty doubtable because it is not one of its properties or multiple properties....oh! and if theres any spelling errors or this doesnt make sense.... its 11:30 so i think its understandable

A is A

This is all a matter of specifics. Obviously, an apple is an apple, a dog a dog, and a clothespin a clothespin. A is A. But when we begin to talk about the attributes of these objects, things change. If we are classifying an object by a certain amount of characteristics it has, such as its color, shape, or weight, questions arise. There are many objects on this earth that contain similar and same characteristics. Obviously, a orange marker is semi-cylindrical and orange, but so is a carrot. I think Identity should mean EVERY characteristic of the object, containing every detail that the thing possesses. (we, as humans, will probably never be able to list all these out, but that's not the point) If identity is any more generalized than that, discrepancies will arise and two things will have similar traits. With this definition of Identity in mind, I think there can be no questions or arguments about Aristotle's rule.
t***~~~this is laurellllll by the way!!!~~~***

still iffy....!

I still think anyone could obnoxiously come up with an object that contains all the same parts as, say, that magic marker. Then this object would still contain all the parts of "P", but would not, in fact, be "P." I am by no means condoning or encouraging this practice, I am merely stating that it is possible. Then I read Molly's post, and that all makes sense, too, so I am still unsure as to what I think, but I had to post because I haven't yet, and when I do figure out what I REALLY think I'll let y'all know!

Aristotle's Principle

I read through Molly's post and I definitely agree with the points made. I would also like to add that it is not only the material composition of an object that define it but it is also the structure of an object. I was reading a book on philosophers by Bryan Magee and there is a very good example in the book.
"If you commissioned a builder to build a house on your land, and his trucks unloaded on to the site the bricks, the tiles, the wood and so on, and he said to you: 'Here you are, here's your house,' you would think it must be a joke, and a bad one. There would be all the constituent materials of a house, but it would not be a house at all- just a hiddledy-piggledy heap of bricks and so on. To be a house, everything would need to be put together in certain ways, with a very specific and detailed structure, and it would be by virtue of that structure that it was a house."

...so relating to the blue marker Mr. Perkins used as an example last Thursday, something might have all the parts of that blue dry-erase marker, but it may not be that marker at all. I believe that the structure must be stated before an assumption may be made.