experience

1. The apprehension of an object, thought, or emotion through the senses or mind: a child's first experience of snow.
2. 1. Active participation in events or activities, leading to the accumulation of knowledge or skill: a lesson taught by experience; a carpenter with experience in roof repair.
   2. The knowledge or skill so derived.
3. 1. An event or a series of events participated in or lived through.
   2. The totality of such events in the past of an individual or group.

[Middle English, from Old French, from Latin experientia, from experiēns, experient-, present participle of experīrī, to try.]

Experience (1914), a play by George V. Hobart. [ Booth Theatre, 255 perf.] Youth (William Elliott), goaded by an insidious but faint‐hearted Ambition, leaves his happy garden and sets out on the Road of Life. His journeys take him to the Street of Vacillation, the Primrose Path, the Corridors of Chance, and the Street of Disillusion. His fortunes fail, and he moves from one frustrating, unhappy adventure to the next. When he is about to take up with Crime (Frank McCormack), the voices of his past call to him, and he stumbles home. There, with the help of Love (Miriam Collins), he finds a better life. Originally presented as a one‐act play at the Lambs, it was expanded by the author and produced by Elliott on Broadway, becoming one of the few out‐and‐out morality plays to find commercial success.

Record of losses, whether or not insured. This record is used in predicting future losses and in developing premium rates based on expectation of insured losses.

noun

Personal knowledge derived from participation or observation: acquaintance, familiarity. See knowledge/ignorance.

verb

1. To participate in or partake of personally: feel, go through, have, know, meet¹ (with), see, suffer, taste (of), undergo. Archaic prove. Idioms: run up against. See participate/abstain.
2. To be physically aware of through the senses: feel, have. See knowledge/ignorance.
3. To undergo an emotional reaction: feel, have, know, savor, taste. See feelings.

Definition: knowledge
Antonyms: ignorance, immaturity, inexperience

Along with consciousness, experience is the central focus of the philosophy of mind. Experience is easily thought of as a stream of private events, known only to their possessor, and bearing at best problematic relationships to any other events, such as happenings in an external world or similar streams in other possessors. The stream makes up the conscious life of the possessor. With this picture there is a complete separation of mind and the world, and in spite of great philosophical effort the gap, once opened, proves impossible to bridge: both idealism and scepticism are common outcomes. The aim of much recent philosophy, therefore, is to articulate a less problematic conception of experience, making it objectively accessible, so that the facts about how a subject experiences the world are in principle as knowable as the facts about how the same subject digests food. A beginning on this task may be made by observing that experiences have contents: it is the world itself that they represent to us as being one way or another, and how we take the world to be is publicly manifested by our words and behaviour. My own relationship with my experience itself involves memory, recognition, and description, all of which arise from skills that are equally exercised in interpersonal transactions. Recently emphasis has also been placed on the way in which experience should be regarded as a ‘construct’, or the upshot of the workings of many cognitive sub-systems (although this idea was familiar to Kant, who thought of experience as itself synthesized by various active operations of the mind). The extent to which these moves undermine the distinction between ‘what it is like from the inside’ and how things are objectively is fiercely debated. It is also widely recognized that such developments tend to blur the line between experience and theory, making it harder to formulate traditional doctrines such as empiricism.

n.

The wisdom that enables us to recognize as an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.

    To one who, journeying through night and fog,
    Is mired neck-deep in an unwholesome bog,
    Experience, like the rising of the dawn,
    Reveals the path that he should not have gone.
                                                        Joel Frad Bink

Quotes:

"Good judgment comes from experience, and experience -- well, that comes from poor judgment." - Cousin Woodman

"Experience is the key to greatness." - Arthur Williams

"We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible." - Oscar Wilde

"Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing." - Oscar Wilde

"An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words." - Alfred North Whitehead

"There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience." - Rebecca West

See more famous quotes about Experience

For other uses, see Experience (disambiguation).

Look up experience in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

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.

Contents 1 Types of experience 1.1 Immediacy of experience 1.2 Subjective experience 2 Alternatives to experience 3 Games 4 Writing 5 Art 6 See also 7 References 8 External links

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 time^{[citation needed]}, 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.

Alternatives to experience

Immanuel Kant contrasted experience with reason: "Nothing, indeed, can be more harmful or more unworthy of the philosopher, than the vulgar appeal to so-called experience. Such experience would never have existed at all, if at the proper time, those institutions had been established in accordance with ideas."^[1]

Games

Role-playing games treat "experience" (and its acquisition) as an important and valuable commodity. See experience point.

Writing

The American author Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote an essay entitled "Experience" (published in 1844), in which he asks readers to disregard emotions that could alienate them from the divine; it provides a somewhat pessimistic representation of the Transcendentalism associated with Emerson.

Art

In 2005 the art group Monochrom organized a series of happenings that ironically took up the implications of the term "experience": Experience the Experience

See also

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Experience

• Empiricism
• Experiential education
• Perception
• Philosophy of perception

References

1. ^ Kant, Immanuel. "Book 1, Section 1". The Critique of Pure Reason. 

External links

• The Experience Project

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - erfaring, oplevelse
v. tr. - opleve, føle

Nederlands (Dutch)
ervaren, ervaring, belevenis, religieuze ervaring

Français (French)
n. - expérience, pratique, aventure, sensation, épreuve(s)
v. tr. - éprouver, ressentir, connaître, essuyer (des échecs), souffrir de (privations), vivre dans (des conditions), subir (un traitement), rencontrer (des difficultés)

Deutsch (German)
v. - erfahren, empfinden
n. - Erfahrung, Erlebnis

Ελληνική (Greek)
v. - δοκιμάζω, βιώνω, υφίσταμαι, αισθάνομαι, νιώθω
n. - πείρα, εμπειρία, βίωμα

Italiano (Italian)
provare, esperienza, pratica

Português (Portuguese)
v. - experimentar, vivenciar
n. - experiência (f), prática (f), acontecimento (m)

Русский (Russian)
испытывать, случай, опыт, приключение

Español (Spanish)
n. - experiencia
v. tr. - experimentar, vivencia, práctica, enseñar por la experiencia

Svenska (Swedish)
v. - erfara, uppleva
n. - erfarenhet, upplevelse

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
经验, 体验, 经历, 阅历, 感受, 遭受

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 經驗, 體驗, 經歷, 閱曆
v. tr. - 經歷, 感受, 體驗, 遭受

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 경험
v. tr. - 경험하다, 경험하여 알다

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 経験, 経験したこと
v. - 経験する

idioms:

• near-death experience    臨死体験
• out-of-body experience    幽体離脱の経験

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(فعل) يختبر, يجرب (الاسم) خبرة, تجربه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮ניסיון, חוויה‬
v. tr. - ‮חש, חווה, התנסה‬

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