experience |
Working Definition:
experience (conscious): awareness of recognizable or unrecognizable data registering upon the senses that can be remembered, organized, and expressed.
Disciplinary Definitions:
In Chapter 3 of Art and Experience, "Having an Experience," Johen Dewey writes:
Experience occurs continuously, because the interaction of live creature and environing conditions is involved in the very process of living. Under conditions of resistance and conflict, aspects and elements of the self and the world that are implicated in this interaction qualify experience with emotions and ideas so that conscious intent emerges. Oftentimes, however, the experience had is inchoate. Things are experienced but not in such a way that they are composed into an experience. There is distraction and dispersion; what we observe and what we think, what we desire and what we get, are at odds with each other. We put our hands to the plow and turn back; we start and then we stop, not because the experience has reached the end for the sake of which it was initiated but because of extraneous interruptions or of inner lethargy.
In contrast with such experience, we have an experience when the material
experienced runs its course to fulfillment. Then and then only is it integrated
within and demarcated in the general stream of experience from other experiences.
A piece of work is finished in a way that is satisfactory; a problem receives
its solution; a game is played through; a situation, whether that of eating
a meal, playing a game of chess, carrying on a conversation, writing a book,
or taking part in a political campaign, is so rounded out that its close is
a consummation and not a cessation. Such an experience is a whole and carries
with it its own individualizing quality and self-sufficiency. It is an experience. (35)
experience Along with *consciousness, experience is the central focus of the philosophy of mind. Experience is easily thought of as a stream of private events, known only to their possessor, and bearing at best problematic relationships to any other events, such as happenings in an external world or similar streams in other possessors. The stream makes up the conscious life of the possessor. With this picture there is a complete separation of mind and the world, and in spite of great philosophical effort the gap, once opened, proves impossible to bridge: both *idealism and *scepticism are common outcomes. The aim of much recent philosophy, therefore, is to articulate a less problematic conception of experience, making it objectively accessible, so that the facts about how a subject experiences the world are in principle as knowable as the facts about how the same subject digests food. A beginning on this task may be made by observing that experiences have contents: it is the world itself that they represent to us as being one way or another, and how we take the world to be is publicly manifested by our words and behaviour. My own relationship with my experience itself involves memory, recognition, and description, all of which arise from skills that are equally exercised in interpersonal transactions. Recently emphasis has also been placed' on the way in which experience should be regarded as a 'construct', or the upshot of the workings of many cognitive sub-systems (although this idea was familiar to *Kant, who thought of experience as itself synthesized by various active operations of the mind). The extent to which these moves undermine the distinction between 'what it is like from the inside' and how things are objectively is fiercely debated. It is also widely recognized that such developments tend to blur the line between experience and theory, making it harder to formulate traditional doctrines such as *empiricism. Blackburn The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy
conscious experience: Experience that an individual can at a given time remembere, organize, and verbalize. Conscious experience includes inner feelings and thoughts as well as overt behavior of one's self and others. Theordorson and Theordorson, A Modern Dictionary of Sociology
Related Terms:
experience gaps: The difference between persons experiences. Experiences that go beyond persons experience parameters (beyond the experiences in their memory systems) but which have been enjoyed by the persons with whom the subjects are communicating.
null experiences: experiences that cannot be enjoyed by subjects because of their gender, race, age, culure, or lifetime.
virtual experiences: the simulation or imagination of sensations framed as a seqeuence of episodes as if it were an actual sequence of events in a person's life history and thereby introduced into the memory system from which it can later be recalled.
Comments:
narrating is a mode of expression that structures experience in a manner that it can be recognized by another person by re-living it.
Notes
"We did not build this whole in which we stand as an element in reciprocal relation with other elements" & "The human subject cannot be treated as a "monad," for it is an entity existing in community by means of a pattern of relations which compose the common world of sociocultural experience." & "we experience life ab initio in common lived-relations (Lebensbezuge) with others" (Ermarth, Wilhelm Dilthey, 1981, 122)
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last revised:
June 13, 2007
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