When should we trust our senses to give us truth?

When should we trust our senses to give us truth?

We mainly rely on our senses to perceive what is happening around us. Also, senses help us survive on a daily basis and really are an integral part of our lives. An example of how senses can help us survive- In 2004, many animals such as elephants and flamingos escaped the tsunami in Sri Lanka and India, the animals knew the coming disaster as they have significantly sharper senses then man kind and managed to escape the absolute carnage prior to it occurring. However, our senses could also defy us- For example Apple make their new I Phone 6 series, their latest flagship of smartphones seem an absolute beauty as they make it really appeal to ones senses(mainly sight and hearing) in the advertisements. This is utterly and completely misleading as the phone in reality is average at most, compared to its Android counter parts and the deluded public fall for the same trick over and over again. This is where our senses can defy us.  

To what extent does imagination play a role in understanding art?

The arts can be a little tricky because there is huge disagreement about what constitutes ‘proper’ art. To some people, almost anything can be art; to others, there are strict rules that need to be adhered to. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, art is defined as the the expression of creative skill through a visual medium such as painting or sculpture, the product of such a process; paintings, drawings, and sculpture collectively. Art comes in a wide array of styles, images and has very mixed meanings. Often the meaning of a painting is extremely debatable, especially abstract and complex pieces of work. Ones opinion is often influenced from their personal background and past experiences, or the many in which they might have been raised. Art is a widely debatable subject,  he definition of what constitutes art is disputed and has changed over time, general descriptions mention an idea of imaginative or technical skill stemming from human agency and creation. The nature of art, and related concepts such as creativity and interpretation, are explored in a branch of philosophy known as aesthetics

Are historical claims restricted by the language they use?

Language is the human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, and a language is any specific example of such a system. Languages evolve and diversify over time, and the history of their evolution can be reconstructed by comparing modern languages to determine which traits their ancestral languages must have had in order for the later developmental stages to occur. Academic consensus holds that between 50% and 90% of languages spoken at the beginning of the twenty-first century will probably have become extinct by the year 2100, I find this statistic quite astonishing! This puts several historical and pieces of work in to question, as yes they can be interpreted and analysed however the analysis and interpretations of them are analysed through the eyes of people with the knowledge of a 21st century person, thus the meaning of historical claims are not quite spot on and not in any way what one would call reliable due to a change in meaning of certain phases and thus, our understanding of history and the distant past is most definitely unreliable and flawed.