⁂ Concepts · Knowledge · No. 45
Experience

CAST: the rhythm strips improved and the mortality doubled.

Experience

What is undergone and learned from - both the raw material of knowledge and, in the plural, the sum of what one has lived.

Theme
Knowledge, truth and reason
Tradition
Cross-tradition
Term
ἐμπειρία · empeiria
Term fixed
c. 330 BC

In plain terms

Experience carries two meanings that pull apart. One is the input - what the senses deliver, the material any theory has to answer to. The other is the accumulation - what a person has been through, which is what we mean by an experienced surgeon.

The second is highly valued and unreliable in a specific way. Accumulated experience is a record of what happened, filtered by what was noticed, remembered and survived. It cannot include the cases that were never seen, and it has no access to what would have happened otherwise.

That is why the most consequential correction in modern medicine was the discovery that experienced clinicians can be confidently and lethally wrong about treatments they have used for years, and that only a comparison they cannot make from the ward will show it.

As a philosopher would put it

Aristotle's empeiria is a stage: many memories of the same thing produce experience, and experience organised by causes becomes technē and epistēmē. The empiricists elevate it to the sole source - Locke's mind as blank paper, furnished by sensation and reflection - against the rationalist claim that some knowledge is prior to it.

Kant's synthesis is that experience is not given but constructed: intuitions without concepts are blind, and what we call experience is already organised by the forms of sensibility and the categories, which is why it can be lawlike at all.

The twentieth century attacked the raw material directly. Sellars's myth of the given argues that there is no level of experience that is both epistemically effective and free of conceptual commitment. Dewey reframes experience as transaction between organism and environment rather than reception by a spectator. And the phenomenological tradition studies its structure rather than its role as evidence, which is a different project running alongside.

Where you meet it

In the 1980s cardiologists had a well-supported reason to suppress irregular heartbeats after a heart attack. Ventricular arrhythmias predicted sudden death; drugs existed that abolished them; the physiological reasoning was sound; and clinicians could see the rhythm strips improve. The drugs were widely used.

The Cardiac Arrhythmia Suppression Trial ran from 1987 and randomised patients to drug or placebo. It was stopped early in 1989 because the treated group was dying at more than twice the rate of the placebo group. The drugs suppressed the arrhythmias and killed people, and estimates of the excess deaths during the years of routine use run into the tens of thousands.

Nothing in the accumulated clinical experience could have revealed it. Each doctor saw the rhythm improve, and the deaths that followed were distributed among the ordinary deaths that follow heart attacks. Only a comparison that no individual practitioner can make from within their own practice showed the direction of the effect.

What is actually disputed

Whether experience can serve as a foundation.

Classical empiricism needs a layer that is given rather than interpreted, so that it can support the rest without needing support itself. Sellars's argument is that no such layer exists: anything with content enough to justify a belief is already conceptual and therefore itself answerable. If that holds, experience is evidence without being a foundation, which is where most epistemology now sits.

A second dispute concerns first-person authority. Experience in the lived sense carries a claim - that having been through something confers understanding unavailable otherwise - and the claim is both obviously partly right and impossible to audit. Standpoint epistemology builds on it; critics reply that privileged access to one's own experience does not extend to privileged access to its causes, and that the two are constantly run together.

Commonly confused with

  • Perception c. 330 BC Perception is a current episode. Experience in the philosophical sense includes what has accumulated, and in the empiricist sense includes reflection as well as sensing.
  • Qualia 1929 Qualia are what an experience is like. Experience here is the evidential and biographical notion, and the two questions rarely meet.

Defined against

  • A priori and a posteriori The whole distinction exists to mark what does and does not depend on experience, which makes it the term this one is defined against

Philosophers

  • Aristotle Experience as accumulated particulars, below knowledge of causes
  • John Locke The mind furnished entirely by experience
  • David Hume Experience as the source, and the problem of going beyond it
  • Immanuel Kant Experience as constructed rather than received
  • John Dewey Experience as transaction, not reception
  • William James The stream of experience described before it is analysed

Works

Schools

Related concepts

Perception c. 330 BC · Knowledge c. 369 BC · Induction c. 330 BC · Testimony 1764 · Fallibility 1878

Aristotle places empeiria between perception and art, as accumulated particulars not yet organised into a grasp of causes; the empiricist sense, of experience as the sole source of knowledge, is seventeenth-century.