Experience

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EXPERIENCE

As the average person understands the term experience, it means no more than familiarity with some matter of practical concern, based on repeated past acquaintance or performance. The experienced doctor or soldier knows his trade, not by the book merely, but by long practice under a variety of circumstances. The older philosophical meaning of the word differs but little from this, denoting as it does the capacity to do something, learned in the habit of doing it and guided rather by rule-of-thumb precept than by theoretical understanding (cf. the well-known passage in Aristotle, Posterior Analytics II, 19). It is in this fashion—by retention of individual memories and their gradual hardening into principle—that the craftsman acquires his skill, the scientist his knowledge, and the practical man his wisdom. But (save in the last case, perhaps) it represents at best only a stage on the way to real understanding in terms of universals and is thus by most ancient writers despised as a makeshift and uncertain form of knowledge. The mere empiric cuts, and continues to cut, a poor figure even into the modern period, though by that time associated, rather (as in Francis Bacon), with the trial-and-error experimenter in alchemy or medicine who endeavors by persistence alone to filch Nature's secrets without first gaining insight into its laws. The preference for rational certainty over mere empirical generalization is in fact endemic among philosophers and can be seen not merely in avowed rationalists (such as René Descartes), but also, for example, in those whose uneasiness over the principle of induction has led them to seek ways of validating it as the major premise for a quasi-deductive treatment of science.

The experience from which the empiric draws his conjectures is, of course, the homely and substantial experience of a world of public objects, which forms for all sane and unreflective persons the basis of ordinary life. It has been regularly insisted, however, since the earliest times, that experience in this sense is nothing ultimate: the alleged paradoxes of motion and change and the more familiar facts of perceptual error and illusion are enough (it is thought) to show that it cannot be straightforwardly identified with the real. Hence, in addition to the rejection of habit-learning as a road to knowledge, there arises that further prejudice against the deliverances of the senses and in favor of necessary reasoning from first principles, of which the Parmenidean distinction between the "ways" of truth and opinion is an early and famous example.

The "Given"

The uncertainty of sense experience leads, by this route, to a further important conclusion. Since perceptual illusion and mistake seem essentially to be the fault of the observer, he must himself contribute something to his experience by way of inference, interpretation, or construction. Experience must, in part at least, be the work of the mind. For all that, the individual certainly does not create or invent his experience and in certain respects is powerless to alter it at will, it seems, therefore, equally undeniable that some part of it is simply "given" and is only thereafter subject to adulteration by its recipient. This given is generally referred to as the object of "bare" or "immediate" experience, in contrast to the more "solid" or developed experience of which it is held to be an essential ingredient. The legitimacy of the contrast is seldom, indeed, disputed, for though immediate experience has often been denounced as a myth, the usual motive for doing so has been to stigmatize it as a mere abstraction got by analysis and not something that could occur, psychologically, by itself. All experience, on this view, involves interpretation, and it is thus senseless to suppose any unvarnished, direct acquaintance with the given. But since it would be equally senseless to suppose an interpretation with nothing to interpret, it is commonly admitted that an "epistemic" given must nonetheless be present in experience, though impossible to view independently, since this would ipso facto be to construe it in some fashion under the auspices of thought.

For writers who accept either a psychological or an epistemic given, a number of problems arise. What does it consist of? What marks or features does it exhibit? How is it related to the everyday experience built upon it? And how, once the latter has been derived, is it possible to proceed from there to the realities that presumably underlie, occasion, and explain the whole? The last is essentially a metaphysical question, but the remainder (to which we here confine ourselves) are staple topics of epistemological dispute.

As to the content of immediate experience, there are characteristic differences of opinion. At one extreme lie the theories of direct realism, whose claim is that material objects are immediately given, so that no real difference arises between naked and clothed experience, sensation and perception, or for that matter appearance and reality; apart from perceptual error there is thus no "problem of knowledge" at all. At the opposite pole are the theories of William James and F. H. Bradley, for whom immediate experience presents only an undifferentiated mass of feeling or sensation in which nothing is discriminated or related and in which even the contrast between subject and object has not begun to appear. Of this "blooming, buzzing confusion" (in James's well-known phrase), it is obvious that nothing can be said, even to distinguish its modes. Ex hypothesi, it is merely the residue left after elimination of all processes involving association, memory, judgment, thought, and language; it is free from error because it says nothing; but as such, however indispensable, it has little to contribute to knowledge.

Writers in the empiricist tradition, less anxious to make knowledge the sole work of the mind, have been correspondingly averse to such unstructured versions of the experiential given, though the argument from illusion has equally deterred the majority from claiming direct acquaintance with a world of things. For most of them the given includes at least simple sense-qualities of color, taste, sound, and so on, together with organic sensations, feelings, and images, it being generally assumed that these are presented individually and even as "atomic" cognitive units (impressions, ideas, sense data, etc.) to a consciousness distinct from themselves. Beyond this, however, there is little agreement. Some have asserted, while others have denied, that spatial, temporal, causal, or other relations are given in this fashion. Some have been prepared to admit associative or sign material as part of the given; others have not. Visual impressions, for example, have been held (most notably by George Berkeley) to be initially two-dimensional; but in other writers (for example, H. H. Price) the claim is that they are presented in, or as having, depth. Images, memory impressions, and feelings have all been ascribed to the given, but again it is disputed as to whether all images belong in this category or only those of simple qualities (as with impressions of sense). There is similar contention as to whether the "pastness" of the memory image is intrinsic to it or imputed on the strength of some other feature, and whether, in general, the "inner" and "outer" character of feelings and images, on the one hand, and sense impressions on the other, are marks of the data themselves, or a construction imposed upon them.

Criteria of "Givenness"

The foregoing differences and others like them are not, as they seem, due to want of regard for the facts, nor would closer attention suffice to dispel them. They arise from a failure in agreement as to the formal characteristics of "givenness" itself, and hence as to the criteria for its identification. What are these criteria? The commonest answers seem to be that the given is private; that it is adventitious (in Descartes's sense); that it is simple, as involving no element of thought or inference; and that it is incorrigible. Too often these tests are also assumed to coincide in yielding the same result or to be sufficient rather than necessary conditions for givenness. Many of the historic uncertainties surrounding the description of the given would appear to have arisen in this way.

Privacy, for example, is inconsistent with simplicity, inasmuch as every variety of thought and feeling, imagery, or sensory seeming is necessarily private, however obvious it may be that it belongs to a sophisticated rather than a primitive level of consciousness. Adventitiousness, as a criterion, would similarly include within the given all phenomena not under the subject's voluntary control, including the appearance and causal behavior of objects, but excluding some part of his thoughts and feelings—though how much it seems impossible to say. In both cases the given seems too generously defined to serve as a foundation for knowledge. If the given is limited to experience uncontaminated by "inference," the difficulty is to know what counts as such and hence where analysis is to stop. Even the lowliest amoeba can react to sensory cues and so "transcend the given," but who is to say if it thinks or not?

The psychological given, on this showing, may well be accounted a myth. The epistemological arguments, however, are harder to put aside. Their main support has been the belief that the data they point to represent the only foundations for knowledge that could be called certain or incorrigible. The judgments of perceptual experience, concerning the existence, properties, and relations of objects, are all (it is said) subject to error, and so open to correction. But reports of what seems merely, of the presence of sense qualities to consciousness, make no such claim about real existence and so run no risk of mistake. The "sense datum" theories popular from 1900 onward, like their eighteenth-century predecessors, attempted to erect on this basis a theory of knowledge more stable and concrete than that underwritten by the necessary truths of rationalism. Their vogue has declined, however, and that for two reasons. On the one hand it has been argued that no sense datum statement, however guarded, can fail (if it says anything at all) to make some conceptual commitment that might later call for retraction; and on the other, that a great many factual statements are quite as certain as those they are alleged to depend on. Given a sufficiently straightforward case of perceptual contact with an object, there is no ground for treating it as a judgment based on the "evidence" of sense data, since it is beyond the power of any future evidence to enforce its withdrawal. It is as certain as anything could be, and nothing is gained, therefore, by an appeal to supposedly more primitive certainties to provide it with support.

Ordinary Experience

The above argument is not beyond question, but it illustrates the difficulties not merely of characterizing the sensory given but even of securing agreement as to its existence. It is more profitable, perhaps, to turn for a moment to those writers who, having accepted a given of some sort from the outset, have occupied themselves with the second stage of the problem, namely, the manner in which this given is elaborated into the fullness of ordinary experience. Here the issue lies chiefly between those who maintain (with John Locke, and still more, with Étienne Bonnot de Condillac) that the concepts employed in the construction of developed experience are themselves derived (by abstraction, association, composition, or induction) from immediate experience, and those who argue (as do all rationalists) that this elaboration depends on principles contributed by the mind a priori, and not first learned from experience itself. The rationalist does not thereby deny the fact of immediate experience any more than does the empiricist. His claim, rather, is that this experience does not make itself intelligible by any natural process and that it is only the logical activity of the mind that brings order and coherence into the result.

The most celebrated statement of this position is doubtless that of Immanuel Kant, for whom the "manifold" of sensory intuition, though spatiotemporally ordered insofar as it is presented at all, is unified into a world of empirical objects only insofar as it is brought under the a priori rules, or categories, of the understanding. Experience in the full sense is thus a synthesis, part given and part made, though in some of Kant's idealist successors the creative aspect is so far emphasized at the expense of the given as to tend toward that extreme of rationalism in which the world of experience is construed as an exclusively mental product, with no element of "brute fact" in it at all. For the modern "logical empiricist" the position is, in effect, reversed, his typical doctrine being (as already noticed) that the content of all empirical propositions can be reduced without remainder to "protocols" recording actual or possible fragments of immediate experience.

But the attempt to reconstitute ordinary experience out of a mixture of sense data and formal logic, though long and ably sustained, has met in the end with little more success than the search for certainty that led to the introduction of these data in the first place. Recent work on the subject has shown signs of impatience with this starting point and seeks to discredit it by attacking the whole distinction between sensation and perception—the two-level theory of experience—and the argument from illusion on which that distinction so largely depends. Whether this rejection of the traditional premises of the problem offers any hope of solving (or dissolving) it is a question that time alone can answer. If experience teaches anything, it is that success is unlikely; but then, even in philosophy (or so philosophy tells us), experience is not always or necessarily a reliable guide.

Bibliography

The literature on this subject is endless. The following is a list of representative works by Anglo-American authors, published in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Audi, Robert. "Experience and Inference in the Grounding of Theoretical and Practical Reasons: Replies to Professors Fumerton, Marras, and Sinnott-Armstrong." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 (1) (2003): 202–221.

Austin, J. L. Sense and Sensibilia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962.

Ayer, A. J. Foundations of Empirical Knowledge. London: Macmillan, 1940.

Ayer, A. J. Problem of Knowledge. London: Macmillan, 1956.

Bonevac, Daniel. "Sellars vs. the Given." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (2002): 1–30.

Brewer, Bill. Perception and Reason. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002.

Chisholm, Roderick. "The Problem of the Speckled Hen." Mind 51 (1942): 368–373.

Crane, T., ed. The Contents of Experience. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Hamlyn, D. W. Sensation and Perception. London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1961. A history of the problem.

Hirst, R. J. The Problems of Perception. London: Allen and Unwin, 1959.

Jackson, Frank. Perception: A Representative Theory. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1977.

Lewis, C. I. Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1946.

Lewis, C. I. "The Given Element in Empirical Knowledge." Philosophical Review 61 (1952): 168–175.

Lewis, C. I. Mind and the World-Order. New York: Scribners, 1929.

Moore, G. E. Philosophical Studies. London: Routledge, 1922.

Moore, G. E. Some Main Problems of Philosophy. London: Allen and Unwin, 1953.

Moser, Paul. "The Given in Epistemology." Communication and Cognition 18 (1985): 249–262.

Pasch, A. Experience and the Analytic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.

Price, H. H. Perception. London: Methuen, 1932.

Price, H. H. Thinking and Experience. London: Hutchinson, 1953.

Russell, B. A. W. Our Knowledge of the External World. Chicago: Open Court, 1914.

Ryle, G. Concept of Mind. London: Hutchinson, 1949.

Sellars, Wilfrid. The Metaphysics of Epistemology. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Press, 1989.

Sosa, Ernest. "Mythology of the Given." History of Philosophy Quarterly 14 (1997): 275–286.

Stace, W. T. Theory of Knowledge and Existence. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932.

Walsh, W. H. Reason and Experience. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947.

Williams, Michael. "Are There Two Grades of Knowledge? Mythology of the Given: Sosa, Sellars, and the Task of Epistemology." PAS, Supp. 77 (2003): 91–112.

Yolton, J. W. Thinking and Perceiving. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1962.

P. L. Heath (1967)

Bibliography updated by Benjamin Fiedor (2005)

Encyclopedia of Philosophy