clear as mud

in theory of knowledge the other day we were talking about how our perception of things can deceive us. how everything we think we know about a situation; our observations, our opinions, our conclusion, can be completely wrong.

i couldn't agree more.

in fact, i knew this person, lets called them gary.
gary and i have known each other for about 2 years now, although we have never really gotten to know each other, it was more a 'knowing of each other' type of relationship. however, i got to know gary. we found each other at several occasions and spent a lot of time getting to know each other. of course i told my friends about gary, they knew him better than i did and gave me some really good advice. my friends and i thought we had the way that gary felt pretty worked out. he was a bit shy, quite reserved, wasn't one to throw people's emotions around. gary was a good guy. then one night, i approached gary to talk to him, this was something we had gotten into the habit of doing so it seemed like a normal situation. but gary was different. gary was blunt, uninterested. gary acted like a complete jerk. so  much so that i was gobsmacked. my friends felt the same. we didn't think that gary was like that at all, everything he had done up until then in fact, suggested otherwise.

our perception of him had been completely inaccurate.

asides from the fact that you can tell i'm probably a bit peeved about the way that gary acted, we can also draw other ideas from this.
maybe our perceptions of events, people and situations are all based on what we want to perceive. of course i wanted to believe that gary was nice, no one would have wanted him to act the way he did. so maybe that's why i perceived him to be like that.
on the other hand though, my thoughts on him were all based on certain things that gary did and said. they were common inferences to make based on what was presented before me. maybe it doesn't matter whether our perceptions of a person are right or not, if the person you have them about disagrees, then i guess that's the thing that counts.
does this mean that we can't trust our own perception though? i would have to say that although our perception may not always be right, they can be trusted; if not as factual and true, then as a direction of how to feel and act.
as to what it says about us as knowers? well thats a perception in itself.