experience
In epistemology, experience is the direct and characteristic epistemic (generally perceptual) contact with that which is presented to a cognitive source of information (mental faculties such as perception, memory, imagination, and introspection). For some philosophers (Descartes, for example), that which is given to any of these faculties is experience (although he does not use this word, but rather the word thought). Experience is not a product of its content or input, the experienced, nor is it reduced to the experimentation of the experienced. It is the direct contact with a certain content in the characteristic way of experiencing that content. When looking at a computer screen, each person has the characteristic experience of a computer screen. When looking at grass, the characteristic experience of grass. When drinking wine, the characteristic experience of wine. Wilhelm Dilthey (Studies on the Foundations of the Human Sciences, 1883 and Theory of Worldviews, 1910) and Hans-Georg Gadamer (Truth and Method, 1960) discuss this issue using two distinct German terms (Erlebnis) and (Erfahrung) for the term experience. Erlebnis would be immediate and lived experience as a unitary reality, and Erfahrung would be reflected experience.



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