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. The history of the word experience aligns it closely with the concept of experiment.
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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. 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. Philosophers dub knowledge based on experience "empirical knowledge" or "a posteriori knowledge".
The interrogation of experience has a long tradition in continental philosophy. Experience is an important aspect of 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 and mysticism) 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. 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.
Most wisdom-experience accumulates over a period of timeFact: date=November 2008, though one can also experience (and gain general wisdom-experience from) a single specific momentary event.
One may also differentiate between physical, mental, emotional and spiritual experience(s).
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.
