Experience

Lore & Background

Experience is understood as a conscious event in the widest sense, involving a subject presented with various items such as objects, properties, relations, or events. For example, seeing a yellow bird on a branch presents the subject with the objects 'bird' and 'branch', the relation between them, and the property 'yellow'. Unreal items may be included, as in hallucinations or dreams. In a more restricted sense, only sensory consciousness counts as experience, identified with perception and contrasted with thinking or imagining.

Reader's Guide

Experience is discussed in various disciplines. Phenomenology studies the structure and contents of experience using methods like epoché or eidetic variation. Sensory experience is of special interest to epistemology, where an important traditional discussion concerns whether all knowledge is based on sensory experience, as empiricists claim, or not, as rationalists contend. This is closely related to the role of experience in science, where it acts as a neutral arbiter between competing theories. In metaphysics, experience is involved in the mind–body problem and the hard problem of consciousness, both of which try to explain the relation between matter and experience. In psychology, some theorists hold that all concepts are learned from experience while others argue that some concepts are innate. The term 'experience' shares a common Latin root with the word 'experimentation'.

Did You Know?

• Experience can include unreal items, as in hallucinations or dreams.
• An experienced hiker is someone who has actually lived through many hikes, not someone who merely read many books about hiking.
• Phenomenology is the science of the structure and contents of experience.
• The word 'experience' shares a common Latin root with the word 'experimentation'.