Allegory Of The Cave

The “Allegory of the Cave” can be explained by using the Abercombie’s perspective. The story is about the one of the prisoners who is chained inside the cave since his childhood. The prisoner’s understanding of the world is very limited to what he can see and hear in the cave such as the shadow and the voice of the people crossing behind. People’s schema is always influenced by the context and used to interpret the information, so that the prisoner believes the shadow is the real object and the voice he hears is coming from the shadow. He unconsciously assumes the voice is from the shadow. However, there are more contexts in the outside world; thus, when the prisoner is released from the cave, he receives more information and makes better observations to use a better schema; therefore, he will believe the outside world is the real world, which shows that the context influences his schema and his interpretation of the world changes.
At first, he could not believe that the outside world can be real, because he has not enough experiences in the outside world to use schema to interpret the information he receives. However, once he spends sometime in the outside world and looks at the sun and shadow, he finds out shadow is the result of the sun hitting objects. The experiences change his schema. It made him think that he finally learns the truth and that the life in the cave is not a real world. He accepts the outside is the real world, because he gains the new context about the shadow. Now, the prisoner is at the observer state 2, because he gains new information which influences his