Seeing and Understanding

7. "We see and understand things not as they are but as we are." Discuss this claim in relation to at least two ways of knowing.
How we reason is shaped by our experiences. We all have different experiences and these shape how we view the world. The idea is that we all register things differently, and therefore we draw different conclusions about them. We all reason differently, yet follow the same basic cultural lines of reasoning, though each cultural idea of reasoning is different. But every person's reasoning is slightly different. The reasoning process can lead us to the same place, yet the method to reach that place is not always the same. There are always subtle differences in the way different people think, because each mind is perfectly unique, and therefore in and of itself it is that person, and can only reason as that person can.
Our experiences and therefore how we perceive is directly related to how we see the world. Our perception is that of ourselves. In the way that all the prejudices, biases, pre-formed ideas, beliefs, and concepts we carry effect the way we perceive the outside world. For instance, in the Elephant Man, most of the city folk found John Merrick to be terrifying, as they had been predisposed to think that something different and deformed is a terrifying mindless monster. This way they have been primed through experience, and authority that differences are bad, as well as deformities, and that ones who look radically different, and no longer resemble humans, are said to be "monsters." When in reality that difference is merely on the outside, but they are primed to ignore anything on the inside and focus on the external; what separates "it" from "us." In the same way, something one person perceives as harmless could be percieved by another as the devil incarnate.