Perceiving and Knowing

Perceiving and knowing are both very different and very similar things. To perceieve is to believe that you know something. It is understanding and awareness. It makes no difference whether or not what you perceive is true. It is true as you perceive it. Opinions, for example, are a prime idea of perception. People believe their own opinions to be true. Opinions certainly cannot be knowledge, though, because there is no way of determining a correct answer in a matter of opinion. To know something is to have a correct perception. Knowledge is truth.

Perceiving and knowing are separate actions. To perceive something is not to know it, necessarily. A person may believe that their perception is knowledge; it may be, and it may not be. That is not the point of perception, though. To have knowledge, on the other hand, is to have the truth. A person can have knowledge of something, but choose to ignore it. They can know a fact, but not perceive it. The difference between knowledge and perception is the importance, or unimportance, of truth. One can both perceive and know something, but knowledge and perception do not rely on each other.

Based on how I have defined knowledge, there can be no way of knowing that is superior to another. If knowledge is truth, there can be no truth that is superior to another truth. However, if someone has perception of one thing and knowledge of another, it is clear that the knowledge is superior to the perception. The knowledge cannot be disproven, while the perception can be. However, a person may not be able to distinguish some of their perceptions from knowledge, and therein lies the difficulty of ascertaining the truth.