Experience and Nature

EXPERIENCE AND PHILOSOPHIC METHOD

As Mr. Ralph Perry has said, experience is a weasel word. Its slipperiness is evident in an inconsistency characteristic of many thinkers. On the one hand they eagerly claim an empirical method; they foresweay the a priori and transcendent; they are sensitive tothe charge that they employ data unwarranted by experience. On the other hand, they are given to deprecating the conception of experience; experience, it is said, is purely subjective, and whoever takes experience for his subject-matter is logically bound to land in the most secluded of idealisms.

Interesting as the theme is, it is aside from our purpose to account for this contradictory attitude. It may be surmised, however, that those guilty of the contradiction think in two insulated universes of discourse. In adherence to empirical method, they think of experience in terms of the modern development of scientific method; but their idea of experience as a distinctive subject matter ‘is derived from another source—introspective psychology as it was elaborated in the nineteenth century. But we must make a choice. If the identification of experience with purely mental states is correct, then the last thing one should profess is acceptance of empirical method as the scientific road to the understanding of the natura and social world in which we live. And if scientific method is intrinsically empirical, then the subject-matter of experience cannot be what introspective psychologists have told us it is.