Experience as a general concept comprises knowledge of or skill 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. For example, the word experience could be used in a statement like: "I have experience in fishing".
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 specific 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 military recruit-training (also known as "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.
Read more about Experience: Types of Experience, Contexts of Experience, Changes in Experience Through History, Alternatives To Experience, Writing, Art
Other articles related to "experience":
... but not separate from all contents of experience ... Psychosynthesis suggests that 'we can experience the will as having four stages ... contents come and go, while “I” may remain present to each experience as it arises ...
... Work experience is the experience that a person has been working, or worked in a specific field or occupation ...
... Able to offer appropriate command experience on fixed-wing aircraft or helicopters ... Engineer with a minimum of 5 years' post qualifications experience ... Knowledge and experience of modern aircraft control systems ...
... In Ancient Rome it was believed that personal experience was part of some divine or species-wide collective experience ... movements and military morale with such notions, than a strictly personal idea of experience ... investigators of these ideas of collective experience in the 20th century ...
... In 2005 the art group Monochrom organized a series of happenings that ironically took up the implications of the term "experience" Experience the Experience. ...
Famous quotes containing the word experience:
“But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“Life with a daughter of nine through twelve is a special experience for parents, particularly mothers. In a daughter’s looks, actions, attitudes, passions, loves, and hates, in her fears and her foibles, a mother will see herself at the same age. You are far enough away to have some perspective on what your daughter is going through. Still, you are close enough, if reminded, to feel it all again.”
—Stella Chess (20th century)
“... metaphysics, even bad metaphysics, really rests on observations, whether consciously or not; and the only reason that this is not universally recognized is that it rests upon kinds of phenomena with which every man’s experience is so saturated that he pays no particular attention to them.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)