Philosophic Insight from the Blind
Excerpt from “Why Knot?” Buy the book at Amazon
A sightless person perceives the world differently and relates to it differently than a sighted person. The absence of sight does not mean the brain has less data to deal with, but rather it has a different mix of data — not dominated by the data of sight.
In interacting with sighted people and their physical-social environment, the blind develop correspondences between what they perceive and what sighted people describe. Hence, the categories by which the blind organize and deal with the world approximate the categories of the sighted.
But the categories themselves are not essential features of human thought. Rather, they are learned. And the philosophic problems that arise from such categories — similarity, size, shape, color, beauty, time, etc. — are contingent on my having eyesight and having developed the associated mental processes for dealing with that type of data.
A newborn baby does not have sight-related categories. Over time, through the practice of dealing with sight-dominated perceptual data in a sight-oriented world, a young child learns to understand the world in terms of size, time, similarity, etc. Hence, we believe that learning progresses in stages, as children develop the ability to think that way. We learn how to pose questions, how to answer questions, what to accept as proof, and what to believe without question.
In other words, our fundamental concepts of space, time, and self are not structures of our minds when we are born. Rather they are contingent, learned, and alterable.
In different circumstances, without the same faculties of perception or confronted with different kinds of perceptual data, perhaps on a different planet, the human mind could develop in different ways, with different kinds of understanding, different certainties, different questions, different answers.
How I think depends on how I perceive as well as on what I perceive. How I think also depends on how I have learned to organize and process what I perceive.
In the absence of a primary sense such as sight or hearing, other senses and intuition come to play more prominent roles, leading to capabilities outside the range of the basic five senses, and leading to structures of processing and understanding outside the range of the sighted.
The world is much richer than we normally presume, and our ability to perceive and understand extends over a wider range than philosophers have presumed. We should turn to the blind for such insights, and, perhaps, in the future, we might also benefit from the insights of computer-based entities which operate with very different modes of perception.
