“We Are Told About the World Before We See It. We Imagine Most Things Before We Experience Them” (Walter Lipman) How Might Expectation and Previous Knowledge Affect Perception and Therefore Knowledge?

Perception is a way of knowing and gaining knowledge. Expectation, the belief about the way an event should happen or behave, and previous knowledge, understanding and skills we gain after experience play significant roles when gaining knowledge. They frame and lead us into imagine before we experience. Our five senses let us see, smell, taste, feel and hear. People think that we believe what we see. However, we see what we believe. Lipman’s suggestion criticises the false of our senses and perspectives. This leads to the idea that our five senses aren’t much different from our so-called sixth sense, premonition, which is not scientifically supported. Lipman’s statement is tied to the idea that our knowledge has set up by other people’s previous ideas before we experience therefore affects our perception and knowledge.

Our senses have contributed in our life especially when gaining knowledge. We recognise things by looking, smelling, tasting, hearing and feeling. However, our senses have limitation. For example, our eye sights have physical difficulties to see objects far away magnificently. Dogs can smell, hear and even feel better than humans. Humans’ sensory organs are not so great.

Previous knowledge affects perception in art area as well. In late 1800s, when England just started to colonise Australia, not many people had seen unique Australian animals such as kangaroos and koalas. When painters attempt to draw kangaroos, because they did not know how they look like, they imagined and drew kangaroos based on the description made from people who had been to Australia and seen the kangaroos. In some of the pictures, kangaroos look like foxes. In other pictures, they look like rabbits or rats. Their previous knowledge on animals affected their way of drawing; they drew similar European animals. If five blind men who haven’t felt or smelt or heard about elephants before are to touch an elephant, each of them will have different responses. Their previous knowledge will play a big role here; they will think of something that they’ve felt, smelt and heard before.

There are many kinds of beliefs that have been affected by our expectations, previous knowledge and other people’s ideas. One of them is religion. In 1500s Europe, when most of people were Catholic, people believed that the Earth is the central of the universe as their religion told them to believe. Nicolas Copernicus stunned other people with his revolutionary work, ‘De Revolutionibus’, the theory that the Earth travels around the sun. People’s previous knowledge, that universe was a closed space bounded by a spherical envelope beyond which there was nothing, did not give any opportunity to Copernicus who in modern days is regarded as a fonder of modern astronomy. Drosnin, an American journalist, believes in the Bible code, the belief that the Bible is consisted of intentional predictions in coded form. He suggested several predictions; the assassination of former Israeli Prime Minister, the possibility of nuclear holocausts and the destruction of major cities by earthquakes. Some of the predictions have become true, making other people amazed and believe in bible code despite the possibility that it could be coincidental. Because people believe that the Bible is something special, we expect more from it. Other books can have similar codes to the Bible. Many people believed in Nostradamus’ prediction that there will be the end of the world in 1997, and in 1997, even casual happenings such as apple drops for them seemed as the sign of the doomsday. Evidently, people are likely to see what they believe.

Pseudocyesis is another example that reveals how the expectations can affect what people see. Theoretically, if a women desires pregnancy badly enough she may interpret minor changes in her body as signs of pregnancy. The belief and expectation that they are pregnant affect their thoughts, perception and therefore also what they see.

We cannot rely on our sight abilities sometimes because human eyes sometimes make mistakes. In physics, it says that when a spoon is put in a cup of water, it looks bent because of light is being refracted by the water. The spoon is not bent but it looks bent. The ‘rat-man illusion’ and the ‘old woman-young woman illusion’ are good examples that reveal the faults of perception in natural science area. According to Bugeleski and Alampay, the subjects presented with pictures of animals and then the ambiguous ‘rat-man’ figure were more likely to see the rat than a control group who were more likely to see the man. Our previous knowledge therefore affects us when recognising objects and therefore when gaining knowledge as well. The ‘old woman-young woman illusion’ reveals how humans can be see different things by age, culture and perception. The experiment shows that young people then to see a young girl and older people are more likely to see an elderly lady in ‘old-young woman illusion’.

In the area of history, the idea that expectation and previous knowledge affect perception and therefore knowledge can be suggested by the case of Margaret Mead, an American cultural anthropologist. As a student of Boas, Mead had learned anthropology in the Boasian school of "cultural determination." Her main article, ‘Coming of Age in Samoa’ has caused Mead-Freeman controversy. Freeman, a New Zealand anthropologist refuted the claims of Margaret Mead in her study of Samoan society. Freeman discovered that her anthropological thought was advocated by both Boas and Ruth Benedict. Freeman believes that Mead left for Samoa with the purpose of confirming this theory rather than to gain new ideas. After Freeman died, the New York Times concluded that "many anthropologists have agreed to disagree over the findings of one of the science's founding mothers, acknowledging both Mead's pioneering research and the fact that she may have been mistaken on details." This case suggests that Mead’s previous knowledge from her teacher and colleague affected her ways of seeing Samoa and therefore her knowledge of Samoa.

People followed and obeyed to dictators like Hitler, Stalin and Mao. They truly believed that their leaders made righteous decisions to make their country great as they were brainwashed by the government’s propaganda. Their expectations toward their leaders were so great that they believed in them no matter what without a doubt. Their perception of violent crimes such as killing people changed the moral status because of these expectations. They thought they are doing it for other people’s good and for their country. Our perception is one of the most significant ways of knowing. Human senses and beliefs play great roles in our perception but we simply can not just rely on them when gaining knowledge. For hundreds of years people believed that the earth was centre of the universe and that everything was made up of four elements – fire, water, earth, and air. People even believe that some people were natural slaves but these beliefs turned out to be wrong. As these examples show, the mere longevity of a belief is no guarantee of its truth. These fallacies can affect our perception and therefore knowledge. Before an actual experience, humans tend to imagine and set up expectations second-hand knowledge which comes from other people. If we do not try to question ourselves on our beliefs and previous knowledge, we may gain fallible knowledge as they affect our ways of knowing.