Course Textbook:

Goldstein, E.B. (2017) Sensation and Perception. 10th edition. California: Cengage.

Think about and respond to the intriguing questions at the end of this section.

This part of the forum should be 300 words.

Background: A story has circulated for years about an eccentric philosophy professor gave a one question final exam after a semester dealing with a broad array of topics.

The class was already seated and ready to go when the professor picked up his chair, plopped it on his desk and wrote on the board,

"Using everything we have learned this semester, prove that this chair does not exist."

Students wrote feverishly, erasers erased, hands cramped, and notebooks were filled in furious fashion.Some students wrote over 20 pages in one hour, attempting to refute the existence of the chair. One member of the class however, was up and finished in less than a minute.

Weeks later, when the grades were posted, the rest of the group wondered how he could have gotten an "A" when he had barely written anything at all. Word soon spread when it was learned what his answer had been. It had consisted of only two words: -- "What chair?"

The triumph of the student over the stodgy professor notwithstanding, consider and respond to these sensation and perception (not philosophy) questions: How can we know whether others actually see the same things that we do? We may have learned to use the same words to label things, but how can we tell if what we see is different?

How does this impact the scientific study of perception? Note: The answer to the latter portion of this question can't be "It doesn't affect" or "I don't know." It might help or hinder research if we don't all actually see the same things in our world. Think this through and suggest possibilities.

General Instructions Applicable to All Forums:

This post must be a minimum of 300 words in length.

Forum post source citation is not required for forum posting in our class. This is because we are engaging in conversation that happens to be in writing form, not composing essays or research papers. You will, however, need to paraphrase (restate in your own words) any words of published authors in parts of your posts that are based on their work.

Copying of published material, which is plagiarism, is prohibited and any instances of it, including forum posts, will result in a zero score without an option for re-submission to recoup lost points and a report sent to the Registrar's Office per University policy.

Discussion forum posts will be graded on verbal expression, critical thinking, making an effort to not just participate in but contribute to the dialog with initial and reply posts of a substantive nature commensurate with graduate level studies. Posts must have correct grammatical construction, spelling, and punctuation with no texting or other casual style language.