ARTICLE CRITIQUE

Article Critique: Scenes, Smell, Touch, Taste, Hear, Sight

Article Critique: Scenes, Smell, Touch, Taste, Hear, Sight

Introduction

Sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste are basic the human senses that connect us to the outside world. Without these, we cannot understand and learn anything. Sense of hearing is one of the most important senses because of its relevance to the skills of speaking (Reed 2003). Hearing is the ability to perceive the actions, intentions and commands of the external stimuli. This paper critically examines the significance of the primary human sense, hearing and sight, using evidence from a research article by Paul Stoller.

Discussion

 In health we only know our nerves as special ways of feeling called the senses. If we sit with open eyes, we see, hear, touch, taste and smell: and if we analyse these experiences we find that each of them confirms all the others. The senses are five differentiations of feeling, each of which appears to intensify the other four. This appearance misleads us as a rule into making the evidence of the senses our standard of reality. That which we feel as touch is neither more nor less real because the same feeling can be expressed as sight, sound, taste, and smell.

 Anthropologist Paul Stoller in The Taste of Ethnographic Things (1989), a study that examines the vital role senses other than vision play in the lives of the Songhay of Niger, offers an explanation for Vasquez's preference for touch as the sense of knowledge and my own quick preference for sight. Hegel, states Stoller, created the lead in “separating the intelligible from the sensible” senses. The “intelligible” incorporates only the senses of vision and hearing, known as the “higher senses”; the "lower senses," by contrast, are taste, smell, and touch. The fundamental distinction is that the “higher senses” ...