Reconciling Different Sources of Knowledge

As you are reading this, you may be seated at a desk. In examining this desk you would
observe that it is smooth and hard with your sense of touch. If you were to tap it, the desk would
probably sound dense and solid to your sense of hearing. Using your sense of sight you may
notice that it doesnt have any holes and you cant see through it. Smelling the desk could tell
you about what its made of, such as solid wood. Tasting the desk might allow to taste the wood.
Using your senses you can determine, with a relatively high degree of certainty, that the desk it
solid. However, science tells us that the table is mostly empty space. The atoms that make up the
desk are 99% percent empty space. Clearly these two different sources of knowledge dont lead
us to the same conclusion. So, how can we reconcile these two different sources of knowledge?
In tackling this question, the first problem arises when considering human senses. The
human senses are somewhat limited, and they can be easily deceived. An optical illusion is
essentially a way to deceive your eyesight. Optical illusions try to make us perceive with our
senses something that isnt true, often with great success. A basic optical illusion would be the
example of a white wall with yellow light shining on it. The wall will appear to be yellow even
though the wall is actually white. This simple optical illusion illustrates how the human senses
can be deceived or misled.
More vivid examples of optical illusions that affect the other senses would be
hallucinations, or experiences which seem exactly similar to the perception of the real world, but
are not real. These phenomena are specific to the person; that is only the specific person can
experience their hallucination. Hallucination can be visual, auditory, or even tactile. This
localized deception of the senses is another example of how the human senses can play tricks on
us.

This fact extends to the other senses as well. Every sense (sight, smell, taste, hearing, and
touch) can be tricked, deceived, and misled. Human sense perception is flawed and cannot be
necessarily trusted. As in the case of the desk it is shown that trusting human senses leads to the
wrong conclusion. In order to arrive at the right conclusion, the human senses must be compared
to other ways of knowing.
In contrast to the human senses, science and the scientific method provide much more
accurate and trustworthy sources of information. The scientific method is strong partly because it
combines multiple ways of knowing. The scientific method is partly based off of perception.
Indeed observation is often part of the scientific method. However, the scientific method also
uses reason to ask and answer question about how things work. It is this addition of reason that
makes the scientific method so much stronger than perception alone.
If we were to examine the white wall with yellow light shining on it, our eyes tell us that
the wall has turned yellow. Without using reason, perception would lead us to believe that the
wall must have turned yellow. However, if reason was to be applied to this problem, we might
come to the conclusion that the yellow light is causing the wall to appear yellow even though the
wall is still white. If we were to apply the scientific method to this problem, we would formulate
an experiment, such as turning off the light, to test if this were true. After testing and supporting
our hypothesis, we would reject our initial thought that the wall must have turned yellow.
Using the scientific method, asking questions about how and why things happen, and
testing our hypotheses is what has allowed the discoveries of atoms, black holes, and other
previously unknowns. If we used sense perception alone, it is highly unlikely these discoveries
would have been made.

So, we once again come back and examine the table. Two different sources of knowledge
give us two different and conflicting pieces of information On the one hand we have our sense
perception telling us that the table is solid. On the other hand, we have our scientific knowledge
based upon reason and sense perception that tells us that the table is mostly empty space due to
the fact that the table is made up of atoms and atoms are mostly empty space. In our everyday
lives we may say that the table is solid, and it would work practically. However, our knowledge
of atoms acquired through the scientific method would have to be incorrect as the table could not
be made up of atoms and completely solid at the same time.
In order to reconcile these two conflicting sources of information, we must reject one
source of information. In almost all cases our sense perception should be rejected before our
scientific information is rejected. As demonstrated earlier, our sense perception can be deceived
easily. Furthermore, the scientific information we have is probably not exclusively ours; the
scientific knowledge we have has been known, rigorously tested, and pondered by many.
Furthermore, the scientific method is fundamentally sounder because it incorporates two
different ways of knowing.
When reconciling two conflicting sources of information from any source, it is important
to analyze which source of information is likely to contain error. Assuming that its not possible
for both conflicting sources of information to be correct, one or both must be rejected during
reconciliation. Sense perception is notorious for error, so I suspected that the error originated
from it. However, other sources of information can contain error or inaccuracies, and these
should be examined carefully. Ultimately the source of information with the least amount of
error should be held as truth. However, one must always keep an open mind in case new

information surfaces and changes our understanding of how things work. For now, the table is
mostly empty space.