The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines "experience" as "a direct observation of or participation in events as a basis of knowledge." The term encompasses a variety of related meanings, leading to diverse definitions in academic literature. It is often understood as a conscious event, sometimes limited to perception or sensation, through which a subject gains knowledge of the world. In a broader sense, it includes other conscious events like thinking or dreaming. In another context, "experience" denotes the knowledge and practical familiarity that conscious events bring, as in the case of a person with job experience or an experienced hiker. The word "experience" shares a common Latin root with "experimentation."
Experience is frequently understood as a conscious event in its widest sense, encompassing perception, bodily awareness, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, action, and thought. While typically referring to an individual's experience, it can also describe the collective experience of a group, such as a nation or social class. Phenomenology is the discipline that investigates the subjective structures of experience, exploring what it is like from a first-person perspective to undergo different conscious events.
When an individual has an experience, they are presented with various items, which can belong to diverse ontological categories like objects, properties, relations, or events. These items can be familiar or unfamiliar, meaning one can experience something without fully understanding it. In its broadest sense, experience can include unreal items, as in illusions, hallucinations, or dreams. Experiences may consist of only real items, only unreal items, or a combination of both. Phenomenologists have proposed basic features of experience, including spatial-temporal awareness, the distinction between foreground and background attention, self-awareness, a sense of agency and purpose, bodily awareness, and awareness of other people.
In a more restricted sense, only sensory consciousness is considered experience. This allows for experiencing something without understanding it, such as someone experiencing a robbery without fully comprehending the events. This characterization excludes more abstract forms of consciousness, sometimes leading to a distinction between experience and thought, or experience and theory. However, these views are not universally accepted, with critics noting that experience involves cognitive components beyond mere sensory consciousness. Another approach differentiates between internal experience, like remembering or imagining, and external experience, such as sensory perception.
In another sense, experience refers to the knowledge produced by conscious events, specifically when this knowledge arises from direct perceptual contact with the external world. Direct knowledge is obtained through immediate observation, without inference. Indirect knowledge, acquired through books or movies, does not constitute experience of the topic itself, as the direct contact is with the medium, not the subject. The objects of this knowledge are often considered public objects, accessible to most people.
In everyday language, "experience" typically implies not just theoretical or descriptive knowledge, but also practical know-how or familiarity with a specific matter. This familiarity stems from recurrent past acquaintance or performances, often involving learned skills rather than mere theoretical understanding. However, the knowledge and skills gained directly this way are usually limited to generalized rules-of-thumb, lacking the scientific certainty derived from methodological analysis.
Most experiences, particularly perceptual ones, aim to represent reality, a characteristic known as intentionality. If successful, they veridically represent the world; otherwise, they provide a false representation. The thesis that all experience is intentional, known as "intentionalism," is widely held, often extending to all mental states. Experiences are given special prominence in these debates as they appear to be the most fundamental form of intentionality. It is generally accepted that all experiences possess phenomenal features, meaning there is "something it is like" to undergo them. Opponents of intentionalism argue that phenomenal and intentional features can be distinct, citing examples like pure sensory experiences such as pain, which they claim lack representational components. Intentionalism's defenders counter that these states do have intentional aspects, for instance, pain representing bodily damage. Mystical states, where awareness exists without an object, are another purported counterexample, though their rarity makes investigation difficult.
Another debate concerns whether all experiences have conceptual contents. Concepts are general notions forming the basic building blocks of thought, contrasted with sensory contents like colors or noises. This discussion is particularly relevant for perceptual experience, with some empiricists claiming it consists solely of sense data devoid of conceptual content.
The idea that such an experience exists and is epistemologically significant has been labeled the "myth of the given" by its critics. The "given" refers to the immediate, uninterpreted sensory contents of these experiences. This discussion is rooted in a distinction between "bare" or "immediate" experience and more developed experience. The premise is that some aspects of experience are directly given without interpretation, and these basic aspects are then interpreted, leading to a richer, conceptual experience that reveals new relations between elements. This distinction could explain faulty perceptions, such as illusions, as arising from false interpretations rather than being present at the most basic level. Thus, experience is often seen as a product of both the world and the subject. The distinction between immediate and interpreted aspects of experience is contentious, with some critics arguing that all experience is interpreted. A counter-argument to this criticism is that it is unclear how interpretation could begin without something to be interpreted.
Among those who accept some form of immediate experience, theories vary. Sense datum theorists believe immediate experience comprises only basic sensations like colors, shapes, or noises, which are then ordered by mental processes into everyday objects. Direct realists, conversely, hold that material everyday objects themselves are the immediate given. Philosophers have sought general characteristics of immediate experience or "the given," often identifying them as private, sensory, simple, and incorrigible. Privacy means the experience belongs solely to the subject. Simplicity implies basic building blocks free from interpretation. Incorrigibility, important in epistemology, suggests that certain fundamental aspects of our experience cannot be wrong, even if inferences about external reality might be. Critics argue that even how things seem to us can be wrong due to conceptualization at the most basic level.
The transparency of experience is a point of disagreement among theorists, concerning whether the subjective character of an experience is solely determined by its contents. This thesis posits that two experiences are identical if they share the same contents. Many philosophers reject this, arguing that how something is presented matters as much as what is presented. For example, roundness can be experienced visually or haptically. Defenders of transparency explain such differences by positing different contents, such as "visual-roundness" versus "felt-roundness." Other counterexamples include blurry vision, where blurriness is seen as a flawed representation rather than a property of the object itself. Some argue that only the universals in an experience determine its subjective character, implying that two experiences with different particulars but identical universals would be subjectively identical.
Perceptual experience is defined as "an immediate consciousness of the existence of things outside us." It represents the external world through sensory stimuli. This occurs across different modalities, such as visual, auditory, or haptic perception. The objects perceived are typically considered ordinary material objects, like stones or flowers, presented as public entities existing independently of the perceiving mind. This contrasts with imaginative experience. Perceptual experience is often thought to provide direct contact with the object, with the perceiver usually unaware of the underlying cognitive processes. While generally a reliable source of information, perception can include false information in the form of illusions and hallucinations. Sometimes, the unreliability is indicated within the experience, like blurry vision, but not always.
This leads to the "problem of perception," where the ascribed features of perception seem incompatible. In misleading perceptions, objects that do not exist may be presented, which would be impossible if there were direct contact with existing objects. Various solutions have been proposed. Sense datum theories suggest we perceive sense data, which exist even in illusions, thereby denying that ordinary material things are the objects of perception. Disjunctivists argue that veridical perceptions and illusions are different kinds of experience. Other approaches include adverbialism and intentionalism. The challenge is that no single approach fully satisfies, as each seems to contradict some introspective evidence about perceptual experience.
Episodic memory involves reliving a past event previously experienced, distinct from semantic memory, which provides factual knowledge without an experiential component. In episodic memory, the past event is consciously re-experienced, akin to mental time travel. However, it is not an exact copy of the original experience, as the event is presented from the current perspective, imbued with a feeling of pastness or familiarity. Episodic memory is often said to provide two types of information: first-order information about the past event and second-order information about its role in the subject's current memory. It differs from merely imagining a past event in its aim to represent the original experience accurately, and in its vividness and causal connection to the original event.
Imaginative experience involves a unique form of representation where objects are presented without aiming to reflect actuality. Like memory but unlike perception, mental images in imagination are not typically caused by sensory organ stimulation. Both imagination and memory are often thought to depend on prior perceptual acquaintance with the experienced contents. However, imagination allows for greater freedom, as the subject can vary, change, and recombine experienced contents, whereas memory aims to preserve the original order. Theorists focus on different aspects of imagination: the impoverishment view highlights its lesser vividness compared to perception and memory; the will-dependence view emphasizes the will's power to shape imaginative contents; and the nonexistence view focuses on the impression of unreality. Despite its freedom and detachment from actuality, imaginative experience can serve epistemological functions by representing possibilities. Imagination can be deliberately controlled or spontaneous, and subjects can imagine events from an internal or external perspective. Imaginative experiences vary in the degree to which they reconstruct past events or creatively rearrange them. While visual imagination is commonly discussed, other forms like auditory or olfactory imagination also exist.
"Thinking" refers to a broad range of cognitive experiences involving mental representations and information processing, where ideas or propositions are entertained, judged, or connected. Similar to memory and imagination, thinking can arise internally without sensory stimulation, but it is more abstract. It is closely linked to speech, with some theories positing that all thinking is a form of inner speech. This claim is debated, as some thoughts appear non-linguistic, but the more moderate view that thinking is associated with dispositions to perform speech acts is often accepted. For instance, a non-linguistic judgment in thought may be linked to a disposition to verbally affirm the proposition. Theories of thinking include Platonism, which sees it as a spiritual activity discerning Platonic forms, and conceptualism, which holds that thinking involves entertaining and connecting concepts to form judgments and inferences.
Academic literature categorizes thinking into concept formation, problem solving, judgment and decision making, and reasoning. Concept formation involves learning common features of a type, often corresponding to understanding a word's meaning. Problem solving aims to overcome obstacles by finding solutions, either through algorithms or heuristics. Judgment and decision making involve choosing the best course of action. Reasoning involves drawing conclusions from premises. A simpler categorization divides thinking into theoretical contemplation and practical deliberation.
Pleasure refers to experiences that feel good, encompassing sensory pleasures like eating cake and intellectual satisfactions like engaging in a game. Pleasure exists on a spectrum that includes negative degrees, known as pain and suffering. While discussions often focus on the positive side, theories generally apply to both. Philosophers and psychologists disagree on the nature of pleasure. Some view it as a simple sensation, while attitude theories propose it is an attitude towards a content, such as desiring a taste sensation. A third type of theory defines pleasure by its representational properties, where an experience is pleasurable if it presents its objects as good for the experiencer.
Emotional experiences, such as fear, anger, or joy, typically include pleasurable or unpleasurable aspects, along with evaluative components (ascribing value to an object), physiological components (bodily changes), and behavioral components (reactions). For example, encountering a bear might evoke fear, experienced as unpleasant, representing the bear as dangerous, increasing heart rate, and provoking a fleeing reaction. These components are used to categorize emotions, though there is disagreement on which is essential. Dominant approaches categorize emotions by how they feel, how they evaluate their object, or what behavior they motivate. While positive emotions are often self-justifying and motivating, negative emotions are sometimes claimed to foster personal growth, though this necessity is debated.
Moods are related to emotions but distinct. Like emotions, they can be positive or negative. A key difference is that emotions usually have specific objects (e.g., fear of a bear), while moods often lack an object or have a diffuse one (e.g., general anxiety). Emotions tend to be caused by specific events, whereas moods often lack a clear cause and are generally less intensive but longer-lasting. Examples include anxiety, depression, euphoria, and melancholy.
Desires encompass a wide range of mental states, with conscious desires involving the experience of wanting or wishing something. This is broadly understood to include love, intention, and thirst. Desires are typically seen as attitudes towards conceivable states of affairs, representing their objects as valuable and aiming to realize them. This can be positive (creating or maintaining something good) or negative (destroying or preventing something bad). Intrinsic desires are for an object's own sake, while extrinsic desires are for associated positive consequences. Desires vary in intensity, and their satisfaction is usually pleasurable.
Agency refers to the capacity to act and its manifestation. The experience of agency involves forming intentions, planning actions, making decisions, and exerting effort to realize intentions. Desires are often considered the motivational force behind agency, though not all desires are accompanied by agency (e.g., when a desire is fulfilled without effort or when no action is possible).
In a more restricted sense, "sense of agency" refers to the impression of being in control and owning one's actions. Two main sources contribute to this: constant prediction of how intentions will affect bodily movement, compared with sensory feedback (a match generates agency, a mismatch disrupts it); and, retrospectively, interpreting one's intention as the cause of the action, especially when the intention precedes and is consistent with the action.
"Non-ordinary experience," "anomalous experience," or "altered state of consciousness" describe rare experiences significantly different from the ordinary waking state. These include religious, spiritual, mystical, out-of-body, near-death, psychotic, and psychedelic experiences.
Religious experiences carry religious significance for the experiencer, often involving encounters with a divine person, intense feelings believed to be from God, or recognizing the divine in nature or oneself. Some are described as ineffable. Out-of-body experiences involve feeling detached from one's body and perceiving the external world from a different perspective, often floating above one's body. Causes include traumatic brain injuries, psychedelic drugs, or sleep paralysis. Near-death experiences, provoked by life-threatening situations, can include flying through a tunnel towards light, conversing with deceased relatives, or a life review.
The occurrence of these experiences is uncontroversial; for example, about 10% of people report an out-of-body experience. However, their reliability in representing reality beyond ordinary experience is highly controversial, as claims based on them often cannot be verified by regular perception and may contradict it or each other. Religious experiences have been cited to support the existence of a divine creator or the divine in nature. Out-of-body and near-death experiences are often used to argue for mind-body dualism, suggesting the soul can exist independently of the body. Defenders contend there is no reason to deny their reliability, citing similarities to sensory experience or an additional cognitive faculty for accessing such knowledge.
Academic literature discusses various other types of experiences. "Flow" describes experiences where an agent is fully immersed in an activity, characterized by clear goals, immediate feedback, and a balance between skills and task difficulty. Flow experiences, which are pleasurable, can occur in art, sports, and computer games, and are of interest to positive psychology.
Aesthetic experience is central to the psychology of art and experimental aesthetics, referring to the experience of aesthetic objects, particularly beauty and art. There is no universal agreement on its fundamental features. Some accounts emphasize fascination, unity, and intensity, while others highlight a psychological distance from the object, disconnecting it from practical concerns.
Transformative experiences involve radical personal change, leaving the experiencer a different person. Examples include having a child, fighting in a war, or religious conversion. They entail fundamental shifts in beliefs and core preferences. It has been argued that transformative experiences challenge rational choice theory because one cannot know what such an experience will be like until after it occurs, making it unclear whether decisions should be based on pre- or post-transformation preferences.
Phenomenology is the science that studies the structure and contents of experience, investigating phenomena—the appearances of things from a first-person perspective. It examines a wide range of experiences, including perception, memory, imagination, thought, desire, emotion, and agency. Traditional phenomenology posits intentionality as a key structure in all experiences, meaning all experience is "experience of something," directed at objects through its representational contents. Experiences differ from their objects in that experiences are lived through. Phenomenology also explores the conditions of possibility that shape experience, such as embodiment, culture, language, and social background.
Different forms of phenomenology employ various methods. Traditional phenomenology, associated with Edmund Husserl, uses the epoché (bracketing), where researchers suspend judgment about the external existence of experienced objects to focus solely on the experience's structure. Eidetic variation is a method for discerning the essence of contents by imagining an object, varying its features, and assessing which features are essential. Hermeneutic phenomenology emphasizes pre-existing familiarity with experience, seeking to understand how this pre-understanding shapes interpretation and may introduce distortions. Neurophenomenology aims to bridge the gap between first-person phenomenological perspectives and third-person natural science approaches by connecting subjective experience with objective brain processes, for example, using brain scans.
Experience, particularly sensory experience, is of significant interest to epistemology. Knowledge derived from this form of experience is termed "empirical knowledge" or "knowledge a posteriori." Empiricism asserts that all knowledge is empirical, ultimately resting on sensory experience. This view traditionally contrasts with rationalism, which accepts sensory experience as a source of knowledge but also allows for other sources, such as innate or intuitive mathematical knowledge.
A key problem is understanding how sensory experiences justify beliefs. One view holds that sensory experiences are belief-like, involving the affirmation of propositional contents (e.g., seeing white snow involves affirming "snow is white"). Under this assumption, experiences can justify beliefs similarly to how beliefs justify other beliefs. However, many opponents argue that sensations are non-conceptual and non-propositional, suggesting that affirming "snow is white" is an addition to the sensory experience itself. This non-conceptualist approach faces difficulties explaining how sensory experiences justify beliefs. One way to avoid this is to deny that they justify beliefs, asserting they only cause them. According to the coherence theory of justification, these beliefs might still be justified, not by the experiences themselves, but by their coherence with the person's other beliefs.
Due to its connection to justification and knowledge, experience is central to empirical rationality. Whether a belief is rational depends, in part, on the experiences a person has had. For example, a teacher's belief that a student will pass an exam may be justified by their classroom experience, whereas a stranger lacking these experiences would not be justified in the same belief. Rationality is thus relative to experience, implying that different people may rationally accept or reject the same claim based on their unique experiences.
Experience plays a crucial role in science, closely related to its epistemological function. Observational experience is often considered central to scientific experiments, with the evidence gathered used to confirm or disconfirm scientific theories. In this capacity, experience serves as a neutral arbiter between competing theories. For example, Galileo Galilei's astronomical observations of planetary orbits provided evidence for the Copernican Revolution, leading to the rejection of the geocentric model in favor of the heliocentric model. A challenge to this view is that scientific evidence must be public and uncontroversial for scientists to agree on hypotheses. However, experience is typically understood as a private mental state, not a publicly observable phenomenon, which raises questions about its role as scientific evidence.
The mind-body problem, a central issue in metaphysics, concerns the relationship between body and mind. While encompassing all forms of mind, experience is particularly relevant as it is often seen as the paradigmatic form of mind. The "problem" arises from the apparent differences between matter and experience: physical properties are public and ascribed to objects, while experiences are private and ascribed to subjects. Another key distinction is that experiences are intentional, directed at objects distinct from themselves. Despite these differences, body and mind appear to interact causally, a phenomenon known as psycho-physical causation. This includes physical events causing experiences (e.g., a rock falling on a foot causing pain) and experiences causing physical events (e.g., the intention to stop pain causing the foot to move).
Various solutions to the mind-body problem have been proposed. Dualism, a traditional approach, posits that bodies and minds belong to distinct ontological categories and exist independently. A central challenge for dualists is explaining how their interaction is possible. Monists, conversely, deny this bifurcation, arguing that only one type of entity exists fundamentally. Materialism asserts that everything is ultimately material, with minds either not existing or being material aspects of bodies. Idealism claims everything is ultimately mental, with material objects existing as ideas dependent on experience. Monists face the challenge of explaining how seemingly disparate entities can belong to the same ontological category.
The hard problem of consciousness is a related issue, focusing on why certain physical events, like brain processes, are accompanied by conscious experience—that is, why undergoing them "feels a certain way." This is particularly relevant for natural sciences, as human behavior and cognition can seemingly be explained without reference to experience, through information processing via electrical signals. The hard problem highlights an explanatory gap between the physical world and conscious experience. Solutions proposed for the mind-body problem often overlap with those for the hard problem of consciousness.
In psychology, the role of experience in concept formation is a point of contention between empiricists and rationalists. Concepts are general notions forming the fundamental building blocks of thought. Some empiricists argue that all concepts are learned from experience, viewing them as generalizations, abstractions, or copies of original experienced contents. Logical empiricists, for instance, used this idea to reduce empirical propositions to "protocol sentences" recording immediate experiences. While this is plausible for concepts like "red" or "dog," its universality is debated. Immanuel Kant, a rationalist, argued that experience itself requires certain fundamental concepts (categories) that cannot be acquired through experience, as they are conditions for the possibility of experience.