Experience
Overview
 
Experience as a general concept
Concept
The word concept is used in ordinary language as well as in almost all academic disciplines. Particularly in philosophy, psychology and cognitive sciences the term is much used and much discussed. WordNet defines concept: "conception, construct ". However, the meaning of the term concept is much...

 comprises knowledge
Knowledge
Knowledge is a familiarity with someone or something unknown, which can include information, facts, descriptions, or skills acquired through experience or education. It can refer to the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject...

 of or skill in or observation
Observation
Observation is either an activity of a living being, such as a human, consisting of receiving knowledge of the outside world through the senses, or the recording of data using scientific instruments. The term may also refer to any data collected during this activity...

 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
Experiment
An experiment is a methodical procedure carried out with the goal of verifying, falsifying, or establishing the validity of a hypothesis. Experiments vary greatly in their goal and scale, but always rely on repeatable procedure and logical analysis of the results...

.
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
Procedural knowledge
Procedural knowledge, also known as imperative knowledge, is the knowledge exercised in the performance of some task. See below for the specific meaning of this term in cognitive psychology and intellectual property law....

, rather than propositional knowledge: on-the-job training rather than book-learning.
Quotations

Experience is the teacher of all things.

Julius Caesar, Commentarii de Bello Civili|Commentarii de Bello Civili (Commentaries on the Civil War), 2. 8 (50s or 40s BC)

Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.

Benjamin Franklin, Maxims prefixed to Poor Richard’s Almanac (1757)

The experience of every past moment but belies the faith of each present.

Henry David Thoreau, Letter to Lidian Jackson Emerson (June 20, 1843); in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 6, p. 88, Houghton Mifflin (1906)

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

Henry James, The Art of Fiction (1884)

Experience comprises illusions lost, rather than wisdom gained.

Joseph Roux, Meditations of a Parish Priest, pt. 4, no. 28 (1886)

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan|Lady Windermere's Fan, Act III (1893)

Experience. The wisdom that enables us to recognise in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1881-1906)

Experience is a good teacher, but she sends in terrific bills.

Minna Antrim, Naked Truth and Veiled Allusions, p. 99 (1901)

...what we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, [and] of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real...

George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman|Man and Superman, Epistle dedicatory. (1903)

‘Pure experience’ is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.

William James, The Thing and Its Relations, Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912)

 
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