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Experience

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For other uses, see Experience (disambiguation).
Look up experience in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Experience as a general concept comprises knowledge of or skill in or observation of some thing or some event gained through involvement in or exposure to that thing or event.[1] The history of the word experience aligns it closely with the concept of experiment.

The concept of experience generally refers to know-how or procedural knowledge, rather than propositional knowledge: on-the-job training rather than book-learning. Philosophers dub knowledge based on experience "empirical knowledge" or "a posteriori knowledge".

The interrogation of experience has a long tradition in continental philosophy. Experience plays an important role in the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard. The German term Erfahrung, often translated into English as "experience", has a slightly different implication, connoting the coherency of life's experiences.

A person with considerable experience in a certain field can gain a reputation as an expert.

Certain religious traditions (such as types of Buddhism, Surat Shabd Yoga, mysticism and Pentecostalism) and educational paradigms with, for example, the conditioning of boot camps, stress the experiential nature of human epistemology. This stands in contrast to alternatives: traditions of dogma, logic or reasoning. Participants in activities such as tourism, extreme sports and recreational drug-use also tend to stress the importance of experience.

Types of experience

The word "experience" may refer, somewhat ambiguously, both to mentally unprocessed immediately-perceived events as well as to the purported wisdom gained in subsequent reflection on those events or interpretation of them.

Some wisdom-experience accumulates over a period of time,[2] though one can also experience (and gain general wisdom-experience from) a single specific momentary event[3].

One may also differentiate between (for example) physical, mental, emotional and spiritual experience(s).

Physical experience

A human body, for example, may exhibit traces of a past physical experience in the form of scar tissue. For more aware forms of physical experience where physicality remains important, note the popularity of extreme sports and of fairground rides. People can measure much sensory experience - directly or via instruments - as phenomena detectable by living entities or as incoming signals.[4]

Mental experience

Mental experience and its relation to the physical brain form an area of philosophical debate[5]. Some identity theorists originally argued that the identity of brain and mental states held only for a few sensations. Most theorists, however, generalized the view to cover all mental experience. Mathematicians can exemplify cumulative mental experience in the approaches and skills with which they work.

Emotional experience

Humans can rationalize falling in (and out) of love as "emotional experience". Societies which lack institutional arranged marriages can call on emotional experience in individuals to influence mate-selection.[6] The concept of emotional experience also appears in the notion of emotional intelligence.[7]

Spiritual experience

Main article: Religious experience

Newberg and Newberg provide a view on spiritual experience.[8]

Mystics can describe their visions as "spiritual experiences".

Social experience

Growing up and living within a society can foster the development and observation of social experience.[9]

Virtual experience

Using computer simulations can enable a person or groups of persons to have virtual experiences in virtual reality.[10]

Immediacy of experience

Someone able to recount an event they witnessed or took part in has "first hand experience". First hand experience of the "you had to be there" variety can seem especially valuable and privileged, but it often remains potentially subject to errors in sense-perception and in personal interpretation.

Second-hand experience can offer richer resources: recorded and/or summarised from first-hand observers or experiencers or from instruments, and potentially expressing multiple points of view.

Third-hand experience, based on indirect and possibly unreliable rumour or hearsay, can (even given reliable accounts) potentially stray perilously close to blind honouring of authority.

Subjective experience

Subjective experience can involve a state of individual subjectivity, perception on which one builds one's own state of reality; a reality based on one’s interaction with one's environment. The subjective experience depends on one’s individual ability to process data, to store and internalize it. For example: our senses collect data, which we then process according to biological programming (genetics), neurological network-relationships and other variables such as relativity etc., all of which affect our individual experience of any given situation in such a way as to render it subjective.

Contexts of experience

Experience plays an important role in experiential groups.[11]

Changes in experience through history

Some post-modernists suggest that the nature of human experiencing (quite apart from the details of the experienced surrounds) has undergone qualitative change during transition from the pre-modern through the modern to the post-modern.[12]

Alternatives to experience

Immanuel Kant contrasted experience with reason: "Nothing, indeed, can be more harmful or more unworthy of the philosopher, than the vulgar appeal to so-called experience. Such experience would never have existed at all, if at the proper time, those institutions had been established in accordance with ideas."[13]

Games

Role-playing games treat "experience" (and its acquisition) as an important, measurable, and valuable commodity. There is a unit of measurement used in many role-playing video games to quantify a player character's progression through the game, called experience point.

Writing

The American author Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote an essay entitled "Experience" (published in 1844), in which he asks readers to disregard emotions that could alienate them from the divine; it provides a somewhat pessimistic representation of the Transcendentalism associated with Emerson.

Art

In 2005 the art group Monochrom organized a series of happenings that ironically took up the implications of the term "experience": Experience the Experience.

See also

Wikiquote has quotations related to Experience.

References

  1. ^ Compare various contemporary definitions given in the OED (2nd edition, 1989): "[...] 3. The actual observation of facts or events, considered as a source of knowledge.[...] 4. a. The fact of being consciously the subject of a state or condition, or of being consciously affected by an event. [...] b. In religious use: A state of mind or feeling forming part of the inner religious life; the mental history (of a person) with regard to religious emotion. [...] 6. What has been experienced; the events that have taken place within the knowledge of an individual, a community, mankind at large, either during a particular period or generally. [...] 7. a. Knowledge resulting from actual observation or from what one has undergone. [...] 8. The state of having been occupied in any department of study or practice, in affairs generally, or in the intercourse of life; the extent to which, or the length of time during which, one has been so occupied; the aptitudes, skill, judgement, etc. thereby acquired."
  2. ^ Note for example Levitt, Heidi M. (1999). "The Development of Wisdom: An Analysis of Tibetan Buddhist Experience". Journal of Humanistic Psychology. 39 (2): 86–105. doi:10.1177/0022167899392006. Retrieved 2010-01-21. Instead of significant events, however, they spoke of gradual experiences, such as learning through teachings day by day.
  3. ^ Fadul, Jose (2010). The EPIC Generation: Experiential, Participative, Image-Driven & Connected. Raleigh, NC: Lulu Press. p. 9. ISBN 978-0-557-41877-0. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  4. ^ Compare: Popper, Karl R.; Eccles, John C. (1977). The self and its brain. Berlin: Springer International. p. 425. ISBN 3-540-08307-3. You would agree, I think, that in our experience of the world everything comes to us through the senses [...]
  5. ^ Christensen, Scott M.; Turner, Dale R. (1993). Folk psychology and the philosophy of mind. Routledge. p. xxi. ISBN 9780805809312. Retrieved 2009-12-01. Some identity theorists originally argued that the identity of brain and mental states held only for a few sensations. Most theorists, however, generalized the view to cover all mental experience. {{cite book}}: More than one of |pages= and |page= specified (help)
  6. ^ Kim, Jungsik (2004). "Love types and subjective well-being: a cross-cultural study" (PDF). Social Behavior and Personality. 32 (2). Society for Personality Research: 173–182. Retrieved 2009-12-01. Evolutionary theory theorizes that love is just one of the emotional experiences which have been selected during the evolution process since it has helped humans find mates for reproduction [...] {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  7. ^ Note the 1994 University of New Hampshire manuscript by J Mayer and M Kilpatrick: "Hot information processing becomes more accurate with open emotional experience", cited in Freshwater, Dawn (2004). "The heart of the art: emotional intelligence in nurse education". Nursing Inquiry. 11 (2): 91–98. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  8. ^ Newberg, Andrew B.; Newberg, Stephanie K. (2005), "The Neuropsychology of Religious and Spiritual Experience", in Paloutzian, Raymond F.; Park, Crystal L. (eds.), Handbook of the psychology of religion and spirituality, New York: Guilford Press, pp. 199–215, ISBN 9781572309227
  9. ^ Compare: Blumin, Stuart M. (1989). The emergence of the middle class: social experience in the American city, 1760-1900. Interdisciplinary perspectives on modern history. Cambridge University Press. p. 434. ISBN 9780521376129. Retrieved 2009-12-02.
  10. ^ Compare: Popper, Karl R.; Eccles, John C. (1977). The self and its brain. Berlin: Springer International. p. 401. ISBN 3-540-08307-3. With the advent of computers, simulations can be done to provide for virtual reality [...]
  11. ^ Brown, Nina W. (2003) [1998]. Psychoeducational groups: process and practice (2 ed.). Routledge. p. 103. ISBN 9780415946025. Retrieved 2010-03-06. Experiential group activities can be effective parts of psychoeducational groups. {{cite book}}: More than one of |pages= and |page= specified (help)
  12. ^ Compare: Nowotny, Helga; Plaice, Neville (1996). Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience. Wiley-Blackwell. p. 192. ISBN 9780745618371. Retrieved 2010-01-21.
  13. ^ Kant, Immanuel. "Book 1, Section 1". The Critique of Pure Reason. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |chapterurl= and |origdate= (help)
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