Conference on Mind and World, Leiden University, Sept. 22, 1997
THE LOGICAL STRUCTURE OF EXPERIENCE
Jan Sleutels

I want to introduce to you some of the themes of this conference in a fairly straightforward and non-technical manner. I see a double advantage in doing so. First, there may be some among you who need such an introduction in preparation of the lectures to come. But even if you should all be familiar with the philosophical background there remains a second advantage. It is my experience that trying to say things plainly, especially in philosophy, helps to avoid mistakes at the more scholastic level, or at least makes such mistakes more apparent and more easily discerned. I do not intend to make mistakes, but if I make them, let me make big ones for you to correct, so that I can learn from them.

The conference addresses something all of us have a lot of experience in, namely, experience. It may come as a surprise, but this very familiarity should make us wary of experience. As Hegel once remarked, what is closest and most familiar in being, is farthest and least known in reflection (my free translation of the German dictum, "Das ontisch Nächste und Bekannteste ist das ontologisch Fernste und Unbekannteste"). I think this remark fits experience. The concept of experience is indeed hazy, and we usually do not bother to make it any more clear-after all, don't we all know what experience is-from our own experience? But this also means that it is not really clear what we mean when we say (as we often do, in a surprisingly loose fashion) that our knowledge of the world-our empirical knowledge-is based on experience, or that certain of our claims to knowledge are justified by experience, or that they stand in certain other rational, epistemic relations to it, such as being verified or being falsified by experience.

I am accordingly going to approach the subject -- experience -- in a rather roundabout manner. First I am going to consider the way, or rather the different ways, in which we speak about experience in ordinary language. Subsequently and more summarily, I want to draw an analogy with experience in psychology and in philosophy. The distinction which I will by then have introduced will be put to use in the final section, in which I address a specific philosophical problem with experience: how can experience be used to justify knowledge?

What, if anything, is experience?

If I take the grammar of vernacular experience as my starting-point, I do not mean to suggest that the vernacular somehow defines the correct uses of the term 'experience', as you may think. I am not really interested in word meaning in that sense. My reason is simply that, when it comes to giving examples, also in a more technical context, these examples and our appreciation of them will crucially draw on our everyday understanding of experience -- experience as expressed in the vernacular.

In ordinary language we use the concept of experience in at least two different senses. They can be found not only in English, but also in other modern languages, including at least German, French and Dutch. Imagine yourself in a situation in which you are asked the following question: "What kind of experience do you have?" Or perhaps even more straightforward, "Tell me, what is your experience?" Now, imagine the sorts of answers it would be proper to give-depending, of course, on who is asking. I think there are two basic types of answers-or at least two, but these are the ones I shall concentrate on.

The first sort of answer is probably the one that immediately sprang to your mind as I put the question. It is the job interview situation type of answer. It typically consists of a listing of the education you received, the jobs you have had, the people you have worked with, the official functions you have held, generally: the kinds of things you have done and in which you have gained a certain proficiency. (Many people also include their hobbies here, the sports they excel in, and the sort of family life they lead.) When you describe your experience in this first sense, you will typically give a description of the sort of person you are, the way you stand in the world, how you got to be that person and how you came by that stand.

Job interview experience is actually only a member of a broader kind. If we try to describe this kind we get the notion of something that is gradually built up or acquired by a person or by a group of persons. It is something akin to a skill -- a skill in coping with reality. Do not think of a skill here as a mere isolated 'knowing-how-to', a simple non-cognitive trick of co-ordinating the eye and the hand, for instance, as in playing darts or knowing how to handle a hammer. The kind of thing I have in mind often involves having acquired a respectable body of beliefs and having those beliefs at one's disposal-a matter of thoroughly knowing the field you are experienced in. Yet all this knowledge is not what matters most here. The essence of experience, in the first sense, lies in knowing how to apply these beliefs. That is what the experienced person is valued for: being quick at recognising things, diagnosing situations, knowing how to act and being able to quickly take the measures that are needed. The experienced person can take in complex situations all at once. He or she has developed a nose for the Gestalt of a situation. Experience in this sense always belongs to an individual, but it can also be shared by individuals, and it can be passed on from master to aspiring master. It can even be lost, get rusty, become obsolete and outdated. It is typically the product of education and upbringing. Let me call ordinary experience in this first sense 'type-1 experience' or 'Gestalt experience'.

Now, remember the question, "Tell me, what is your experience?" In ordinary language there is also a second type of answer to that question, namely, the sort of answer that describes your current state of consciousness, or some part or aspect of it. In this sense, experience is your being or becoming aware of something, usually in a phenomenal sense (something appears to you), be it perceptually, introspectively, imaginatively, through hallucination, or otherwise. Notice that experience in this sense need not be an instantaneous state or event-it can also be an episode, or a series of states. Like the first kind of experience, experience in the second sense is something that can be shared, or at least we sometimes speak of 'sharing an experience' in this sense. What we usually mean by that phrase, however, is that one tells other people about the experience one has had. Hence, it is not really the experience itself that is shared, but rather one's story about the experience that is communicated to others. Less often we also speak of 'sharing an experience' in a sense in which we mean actually experiencing something together. But again, a closer look reveals that we do not mean that the experience itself is shared: what is shared is the thing experienced, while each person present has his or her own experience of the situation.

You may have noticed that type-1 experience does not admit of a plural, or only awkwardly so. It makes little or no sense to say of someone who has had experience in Africa, who has South-American experience and who has experience in the financial world, that he or she therefore has many experiences. Such a person has a single but vast experience. Type-2 experiences, by contrast, come in indefinitely large numbers. There are presumably at least (or perhaps: at most) as many of them as there are things happening or occurring to people.

There are a number of connections between the two types of experience. Let me first say a word about the etymological connection. In Latin, both experientia and experimentum, have as their primary meaning 'test' or 'trial', based on the verb experiri (to try, to risk, to put to the test, to challenge). The expert (experiri, expertus sum) is one who has been (or has) tried a lot. Hence the derivative meaning of experientia or 'experience' in the type-1 sense as proficiency, and in the type-2 sense as the individual undergoing of the test.

A second connection is the idea that you sometimes (perhaps even often) need type-1 experience to be able to have type-2 experience. It is often said that only the experienced (or natural-born) musician is able to fully experience the music. Similarly, we can all taste food and wine and experience it in a pedestrian, mange-tout type-2 sort of way. Yet, we also know that a more refined sort of experience is open to us, provided we have the necessary (type-1) experience. We have all known danger in an instinctive sort of way, but it takes experience to be able to actually fear -- fear as a man, as it is sometimes said. We have all known fear, but it takes experience (or a natural talent for braveness) to experience your fear as something to handle, as something to act upon. Examples such as these suggest a layered structure in experience, a structure of type-2 experiences being progressively enriched by type-1 experience.

A third connection in what may be called the 'folk psychology' of experience is the idea that the way to get experienced is to have a lot of experiences. In other words, it is often assumed that you get type-1 experience by being exposed to enough samples of type-2 experience in the relevant domain. There is a sense in which this is obviously true-as a trainee you acquire experience by sharing relevant experiences with your master, for instance, or by 'learning from experience', as it is called, that is, by being submitted to a the of tests and challenges on the job. Yet, there is also a sense in which this connection is very dubious, a sense involving a Cartesian assumption about type-2 experience. I shall presently come back to this when I turn to experience in psychology and philosophy.

I end this section with a word of warning. In practice, it is advisable always to carefully distinguish between the types of experience I just described. When on a job interview you are asked, "Tell me, what is your experience", do not say, "Well, right now I am having this kind of, you know, eerie feeling I used to have when I was five or six years old and my father ". And if you do say something like that, don't do it on my authority and don't mention my name.

Experience in psychology and philosophy

Let me now turn to type-1 and type-2 experience in psychology and in philosophy. I want to suggest, in an admittedly informal manner, that the same duality we have seen in the vernacular is also at work in psychology and philosophy.

Experience in psychology

Take psychology first. I do not necessarily mean cognitive psychology here, as you might expect in this context, but rather any kind of psychology, especially also including social psychology. When psychologists inquire into the nature of experience, they typically do so in either of two ways. The first way is that of researching how persons or social groups undergo or are affected by a specific, structured domain of reality. These persons may or may not be consciously, discursively aware of how they relate to the specific domain of reality. What this type of psychological approach does is to enhance, to make explicit, to bring to light the structure of that relation, sometimes by helping the subjects to formulate that relation by themselves (namely, by asking the right sorts of questions), sometimes also in a more abstract fashion, without the subjects necessarily knowing either the nature of the research or its outcome.

A psychologist may for example inquire, 'What is your experience of X'. In the course of the inquiry the question becomes almost tantamount to asking 'How have you come to feel and what have you come to think about X given your experience with X'. Similarly, it may be asked, 'What is Y's experience of X?' For example, 'What is a married man's experience of women?', 'What is California's experience with earth-quakes?', 'How do the French experience history?' Now, the sort of thing inquired into here is experience conceived as a total Gestalt, a complex whole of dispositions, ways of speaking, feeling, acting, thinking-a natural (not innate), gradually acquired, spontaneous, habitual way of relating to a domain of reality. It is, in a word, type-1 experience as discussed earlier.

The second sort of psychological inquiry takes experience in a different sense, namely, that of subjective, phenomenal awareness. The question, "What is your experience?" then usually means something like "What do you experience (see, feel, hear, ) now?". The researcher is interested in knowing things like: Can X tell a difference between two stimuli? Does X become aware of a time lapse? Is X's response influenced by earlier samples? Questions like these are best (and mostly) put in an artificially controlled, stimulus-impoverished laboratory situation. It will not come as a surprise that I see them as questions about type-2 experience.

As in ordinary language, so also in psychology there are a number of connections between the two types of experience. Most notable are the attempts to (re-)conceive one in terms of the other. Thus, mainstream cognitive and computational psychology claims that type-1 experience is just a derivative of type-2 experience. All that matters in psychology -- yes, all that could possibly matter -- is how individual mental representations (percepts and concepts) contribute to your knowledge and to the production of behaviour. In the philosophical section of cognitive science there is a whole discipline called 'psychosemantics', devoted to the question of what determines the content of your mental representations, including your type-2 experiences or 'percepts'. Here a debate has emerged between internalists and externalists -- the first claiming that it is your internal makeup (how you are computationally or physiologically put together) that determines this content, the second claiming that it is the world that does.

On the other hand there are also those (still a dissident minority) who claim that this debate is far too clinical and abstract. They hold that it is not individual type-2 experiences that matter, but rather the social, historical, biological and ecological embedding of such alleged experiences. What matters is a person's (or more generally, an organism's) overall aptitude in dealing with the world-in perceiving, conceiving, handling, manipulating, orienting oneself in the world. The slogan is here: no type-2 without type-1. Some champions of this view even hold that there are no such things as type-2 experiences: in reality they are only artificially isolated components, or utterly dependent, abstract aspects of type-1 experience. A famous example of this sort of approach is the psychology of James J. Gibson (see, for instance, his The sense considered as perceptual systems, 1966; The ecological approach to visual perception, 1979). Percepts matter little to an organism (if they exist at all). What matters is an organism's skill in being in tune with what the environment affords it to see, to sense and to do. In Gibson's terms, psychology is about the organism's skilfulness in 'resonating' with the 'affordances' of the environment -- with its sit-upon-ability, its hide-underneath-ability, its walk-through-ability, drink- and eat-ability, write-upon-ability, and so on.

I close this section on psychology with an observation made by Edward Reed, whom some of you may know as Gibson's biographer. Reed has recently published a very elegant little book called The necessity of experience (1996). The book is about a distinction between primary experience and secondary experience, as Reed calls it. Reed laments the fact that increasingly more of our experience is secondary, and increasingly less of it is primary. What are primary and secondary experience? In my terminology they would both be type-1 experience, the experience of the experienced person-but not equally so. The primarily experienced person has been trained on the job, so to speak, whereas secondary experience is gained from books, from simulations, from TV, from CD-ROM-from anything but the real world. Moreover, secondary experience is typically acquired by being trained on artificially impoverished situations, in which the data one is trained on are narrowed down to fit the one specific task or trick one is required to learn.

Reed expresses his deep concern with the fact that, in modern society, secondary experience is gradually taking over -- largely for reasons of economy, of course, but with a deeper philosophical motivation behind it. The assumption that is supposed to justify the development is that it cannot possibly matter much what the actual cause of your type-1 experience has been, as long as its subjective effects on you -- your type-2 experiences -- are the same. This is indeed a Cartesian assumption: whether it is the real world or a Dieu trompeur (as in Descartes' Meditations) that is causing my experience is in a way irrelevant, as in either case my type-2 experiences will be qualitatively identical (pardon my French). But consider how you feel about this idea in practice. The idea is that it cannot really matter whether a doctor has learned his or her surgery from operating on real people or from virtual surgery on CD-ROM. After all, the relevant states of subjective consciousness (type-2 experience) have been the same. We intuitively feel uneasy about this suggestion. What we want is an experienced doctor, which is not at all the same as someone with a relevant series of type-2 experiences. I think you will agree.

Experience in philosophy

This brings me to philosophy. I think the best-known conception of experience in philosophy is of type-2. This certainly holds for the English-speaking world, which has been heavily influenced in this respect by the British empiricists, most notably by Locke and Hume, I would say. The empiricists thought of experience as the 'experiential taking-in' of 'sensory impressions'. In Hume's view, experience is a stream of consciousness, like a movie consisting of a series of fleeting images. These are the sensory impressions or sense-data, as they were later called. Each of them presents us with an immediate Given, each image holds an appearance. But, according to Hume, all this does not amount to very much. Whatever connection we see in the images-whatever necessity, whatever continuity -- is of our own making: it is not contained in our experience as such. As you watch me moving, for instance, your experience (type-2) consists of a series of snapshots. Each snapshot holds a new constellation (as we say afterward) of body and limbs and background. Yet, the idea that it is in each image the same body and limbs moving against a background is contained in no given image. It is added by yourself on the basis of habit and custom-not part of experience itself. This is how our knowledge of the world develops: all we have to go on is an ever expanding collection of type-2 experiences to which we add something like type-1 experience -- acquired habit and custom.

The type-2 school of philosophy identifies experience with how things appear to you in phenomenal consciousness. That is why it has been called "the red patch school of philosophy" by Peter Geach. Phenomenalism (another word for it) is often glossed as implying the radical subjectivity of experience. Moreover, it often assumes (as Hume did) that experience presents us with non- or preconceptual contents. The conceptual part is added afterwards by the understanding, but it is not part of experience as such.

The type-2 conception may be widespread in philosophy, and perhaps even be dominant, but this does not mean that type-1 is absent. On the contrary, one would almost say that it is everywhere, but in a subcutaneous sort of way, lurking underneath the skin. It played a role, as I have just suggested, even in Hume's philosophy, although Hume did not recognise type-1 as experience. So it is in much philosophy: type-1 experience is simply taken for granted -- usually implicitly so, less often explicitly, and then with a vague promise of eventually reducing it to type-2. In philosophy of science, for instance, it is standardly but tacitly assumed that when scientists check their theories against reality, they have sufficient proficiency in setting up their experiments, in registering and processing the data, and in knowing how to read the data as being at all relevant, in the sense constituting the empirical basis with which to work. Scientists need experience (type-1) to check their theories against experience (type-2). More explicitly this role of skill and habit in science has been addressed by Thomas Kuhn, for example, who gave it a place in his theory of scientific paradigms. According to Kuhn, our habitual, customary, skilful, Gestalt-driven relation to reality (our know-how in handling reality, such as in experiments) forms an inextricable part of our experience of the world, even to the point, on some readings, of affecting our immediate, phenomenal type-2 experience of the world.

As is well-known, Kuhn's highly influential work raised a number of questions concerning relativism. If paradigms define experience, and if experience is our touch-stone for knowing what the world is like, then there can be no cross-paradigm objectivity, no real knowledge of reality. If we should take to heart my earlier remarks on type-1 experience, this may strike us as a strange line of thought. If science is indeed somehow like a skill, in the sense of something for the experienced scientist, then why should we fear for our knowledge of reality? There is no uniquely best way to build a house-how to build it depends in part on the nature of your (type-1) experience as a builder. The more experienced you are, the better the house will be. By the same token, the more experienced the scientist is, the better his/her/our knowledge of reality will be.

So it is with type-1 experience. Type-2 experience, by contrast, being tied to a subjective point of view, invites a much more radical form of relativism with regard to our knowledge of the world, to the point of collapsing into total subjectivism. To each his or her private experience, one's private view of the world. If experience is our touch-stone for knowing what the world is like, to repeat my earlier phrase, then there can be no across-person objectivity, hence no real knowledge of reality. The sheer absurdity of this consequence is, I think, the reason why most philosophers shrink back from pure type-2 experience, and is what brings them to include some type-1 elements into their philosophy.

Of the several possible connections between type-1 and type-2 experience in philosophy I have now mentioned two. One was the attempt to reduce type-1 to type-2 experience, the other to try out a mixture. In Humean terms, the latter is an attempt to build custom into experience itself. That is roughly speaking what Kant did, or at least what the standard interpretation says he did. There is also a third possibility, however, let us say the Reinkultur version of type-1 empiricism. On this version, what experience is, primarily and in the proper sense of the word, is a Gestalt skill in coping with reality, it is a man's qualified stand-in-the-world-the sort of thing you need to get a job. Type-2 experience, on this view, is only a weak extract, a dependent decoction, not a component of experience, but rather an aspect of it. Hence it does not exist, or it exists only in the way that the left side of my face exists. Analogously, type-2 experience is the phenomenal side of experience, an aspect, nothing more.

Reinkultur type-1 empiricism is the sort of philosophy that, I think, still has a future waiting for it, if only because the other empiricisms are too heavily bent under the weight of their past. It is the sort of empiricism I would be interested in to help develop. Now, those among you who are familiar with John McDowell's book Mind and world (and I hope there are many of you, for that was recommended reading for this conference), will have noticed in what I have said so far, running between the lines, a theme familiar from that book. To be sure, McDowell has not invented the theme, for it has a past, too. It is a theme from Aristotle and from Hegel (and from Heidegger, of course), but McDowell has rekindled it and given it a new and modern expression. It is the theme of experience as moulded by second nature, moulded by Bildung or upbringing. In the terminology that I have been using, it is the theme of type-1 experience, and if I am correct, McDowell should be interested in embracing the Reinkultur version.

A philosophical problem about experience

I have indeed been speaking of this theme between the lines, and not in a philosophically very articulate form. Let me now turn to the articulation. Experience is what connects our knowledge to the world. It is that which serves as a 'reality check' on our otherwise wild speculations and metaphysical meanderings. Now, the question is, how does experience do this? This is a question about the relation between mind and world -- a relation in which experience is usually considered to play the role of an 'interface', like an epistemological keyboard or a modem.

Notice that the question, "How does experience do this?", is not raised here as a question about the causal mechanism involved, or about the physiology of perception. It is a question about justification, about the way in which experience can serve as the basis of our knowledge, as we often say, and can be used to epistemically weaken or strengthen our claims about reality. How does it do that?

At first blush it may seem that a causal story might still do. Why should experience not simply be a matter of the world's causing us to be in the right state of mind-causing us to have the right type-2 experiences? The answer is that they would not be reasons, fit to enter into our rational deliberations. Consider the simplest possible example. What reason do you have to claim that there is a table over here? It may be tempting to think that the world (the table over here) is simply causing in you a type-2 experience, and that you could just turn to that experience as your reason. But consider what you would be doing then. It would be like saying, "Well, the world pressed a button in my sensory apparatus, and that is when I always say 'Table over there'". Consider an analogy. "Why did you run over that old woman with your car?" -- "Well, I was drunk". We easily see that is not a reason. It is just a cause of your behaviour. In McDowell's terminology, the drunkenness cannot justify the accident, it is at best an attempted (but awfully bad) exculpation, which gets even worse when you add, "and that is when I always run over old ladies".

To mistake causes for reasons is to commit the so-called naturalistic fallacy. In the present context -- the problem of experience-the mistake is also more graphically known as the Myth of the Given, an expression made famous by Wilfrid Sellars. As if something that is given, the bare pressing of a button, the bare presence of a type-2 experience, could ever be a reason for claiming this or that about reality.

So Givenness cannot be a reason. But what exactly is lacking, then, and what would we need to get a better account of empirical justification? There is a widespread assumption that what is lacking is discursive or conceptual structure: that which is to serve as the ground for justifying our claims to knowledge must mean something definite, that is to say, it must have a content that is tailor-made for being used in discursive reasoning. A bare button pressing has no such content-it might mean anything. A bare type-2 experience has no such content either-remember Hume. What does have the requisite sort of content, then? A standard answer in modern analytical philosophy is: only beliefs, and especially beliefs as expressed or expressible in language. But now we get into serious trouble with experience, for that (on the dominant type-2 reading) is simply not belief. So it turns out that our so-called 'empirical' knowledge of the world is not based on experience, in the sense that it cannot be justified by it. If beliefs can only be based on beliefs, we lose contact with the world, and our knowledge becomes, as McDowell put it, "a frictionless spinning in the void".

We seem to be caught in a dilemma, trapped in a pendulum swing between, as McDowell calls it, naturalism on the one hand (Myth of the Given) and coherentism on the other (frictionless spinning in the void). According to McDowell, there can be no escape from the trap unless we find a way to endow experience itself with conceptual content.

Now, it may seem that one obvious way to do so would be to say that experience-sensory impressions, type-2 experience-simply consists in the world's causing us to token the relevant concepts. Experience is simply a matter of things in the world informing us, "Hi, I am a rectangle", "Hi, I am five". I choose these examples (one of a geometrical quality, the other of a numerical quality) because they concern primary qualities in the sense of Descartes and Locke. And indeed, the above 'obvious solution' is the one endorsed by John Locke in his Essay concerning human understanding (1690):

" imprinting, if it signify any thing, being nothing else, but the making certain Truths to be perceived." (Essay, I, 1, § 5.)

 

"For the Objects of our Senses do, many of them, obtrude their particular Ideas upon our minds whether we will or not (). These simple Ideas, when offered to the mind, the Understanding can no more refuse to have, nor alter them when they are imprinted, nor blot them out and make new ones itself, than a mirror can refuse, alter or obliterate the Images or Ideas which the Objects set before it do therein produce. As the Bodies that surround us do diversely affect our Organs, the mind is forced to receive the Impressions; and cannot avoid the Perception of those Ideas that are annexed to them" (op.cit., II, 1, § 25)

Our experiences of the world are Janus-faced: the causal side facing the world, the conceptual side facing the mind. This would seem to fit McDowell's requirement. But actually it does not, for we are again faced with the Myth of the Given. This time it is not a Given from the outside but one from inside the sphere of concepts. "Why did you say there is table over there?" -- "Because all of a sudden this table-concept occurred to me", or " this tabloid idea entered my mind", to which you should then add, " and that is when I usually say, 'Table over there'". Again, that is not a reason but (at least something like) a cause. McDowell, following Sellars and (in a much less convincing way) Kant, stresses the fact that no such natural or paranatural force can be admitted in the realm of rationality, in the realm of freedom, of the spontaneity of thought. As Sellars put it,

"empirical knowledge, like its sophisticated extension, science, is rational, not because it has a foundation but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once" (Science, perception and reality, Routledge, London, 1963, p. 170).

What options are left, then? I think the only viable solution is to opt for what I have called Reinkultur type-1 empiricism. As suggested earlier, I think that this is the way McDowell's philosophy is or should be heading, and where I would gladly accompany him. We shall deny the reality of type-2 experience, but preserve what we find important and undeniable in it, namely, its phenomenal character-the way things look to you. We shall stop thinking of experience as something that is 'taken in' from outside. Forget about percepts, but then also forget about concepts (at least in the sense in which they are opposed to percepts). Forget about receptivity and spontaneity as two distinct faculties of the mind, for there are no such things. Instead, let us take type-1 experience as our starting-point, the experience of the carefully educated, skilful master. Then we can reconceive the way in which empirical knowledge is based on experience, and is justified by it, not in terms of an endless accumulation and ever repeated reorganisation of bare data, but in terms of learning. Even including learning how to reason. For, after all, the art of reasoning, of arguing, refuting and giving reasons, is also precisely that: an art, a skill, a thing that grows and bears fruit in the hands of the experienced.