The courses in this theme explore the relationship between perception and reality from scientific, philosophical, sociological, historical, and cultural perspectives. This diversity demonstrates the importance of this issue across disciplines, and indeed, throughout time. From the ancient world to the modern, the relationship between reality and perception permeates nearly all academic disciplines as well as all professional fields - and even everyday life. How we discern reality and adjudicate between competing interpretations and possibilities arguably affects every decision a person makes. From the complex to the commonplace, the decisions that people make or find forced upon them involve a multitude of factors that shape perceptions, which in turn shape subsequent decisions.
Perceptions obviously affect our lives in both deep and subtle ways.
Our perceptions are influenced by personal and societal beliefs in science and religion, by private imagination and hopes, and by external social and natural forces, both known and unknown. Reality is thus both certain and uncertain, a negotiated process that depends both on the nature of objective reality and our perception of it. The central unity among the courses in this theme is the interaction between perception and objective reality. More specifically, the theme explores the way in which beliefs, values, conceptual systems, historical and personal experience, physiology and physics influence the way individuals and groups see and understand the world. This theme encourages critical reflection on many fixed conventional assumptions about knowledge and reality, and emphasizes a multi-perspectual approach that reveals the dynamic complexity of knowledge formation as the result of an interaction between cognitive actors and external objects.