If it is true that seeing is believing, it feels like that opens up a lot of room for mistake.
First, it puts visuals on a pedestal, while informally dismissing deduction.
A priori knowledge counts too, after all.
But second, only believing what you see and experience can allow others the opportunity to manipulate you.
For you are not the only one that knows how powerful visuals can be.
Aren’t we all just searching for the truth, in our own messy ways?
The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise.
-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim At Tinker Creek