BYU Studies Quarterly
Keywords
sensory perception, light, sense ratio, God's light
Abstract
While many Westerners once assumed that sensory perception is more or less constant and universal, scholarship in the area of sensory studies has shown how volatile and diverse sensory discernment can be. For instance, though Western epistemology categorizes sensory knowledge into five senses, people across world cultures do not agree on the number of human senses that exist (some enumerate two, four, six, or seven senses), nor do they agree on how the senses function. As anthropologists have illuminated, these various notions of sensory perception lead people to translate sensory experience into vastly different worldviews. Thus, researchers have concluded that there is no such thing as “common sense,” as the senses are not universally common, nor do they function together to produce one shared understanding of how the world works.
Recommended Citation
Abbott, Philip
(2024)
"Tasting God’s Light: Saints and the Spiritual Senses,"
BYU Studies Quarterly: Vol. 63:
Iss.
3, Article 5.
Available at:
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol63/iss3/5