I must admit that I’m just pretending not to understand the meaning of “experience” in philosophy, in order to ask what is it. I think when one tries to explain the meaning of “experience” in philosophy, and fails to do by directly pointing to it, it becomes obvious that it is theoretical term, and not something that we are directly aware of.
And this relates to the second point – the failure to distinguish this technical use from the everyday use, and taking our intuitions related to the experience1 (in everyday sense) and taking them as if they are truths about experience2 (technical sense).

I DID in fact think in terms of this technical/philosophical usage of “experience” in the past. Basically I did buy some form of Kantian idealism. Now I think I was wrong along with other philosophers who think in terms of this technical use.

The closest point you got was the mention of qualia. Consider the bear in the woods. I actually have a knife, and as a knife-fighting philosopher I can defeat the bear. I have sight of the bear, hear sounds, and can determine it’s position, gain knowledge, formulate a plan. But, if there is another bear behind me, I may not see/hear it. My qualia do not include that bear until it eats my head.

This emphasises how important it is to understand that experience, from a subjective human perspective, only includes the amount of information about the world external to the perceiver contained in the cognitive content of said perceiver.

I think that it is important to defend the use of the term “experience” in the precise way that you find offensive, because it unlocks philosophical methods, problems and answers otherwise unreachable.

The quote Grice, I prefer ontological Marxism. Essentially, if it works, it may exist.

Re. that experience can’t get things wrong, I do believe it, because by experience I mean np-experience. You say that thing might not be as it appears, and I do agree, but I don’t think that we need to postulate p-experience for that. Let me point to the second citation from Ryle in the recent post, and also to the ‘Appears as red object’ vs ‘Is a red object’ post where I wrote about that issue.

Because those sentences are about an experience of mine. The sentence ‘I sit on a chair in my private room’ is not about my experience in the same way…in fact these two sentences clearly illustrate the difference between what you call p-experience and np-experience. I am sympathetic to what you say about privilaged access, but that is not the point. So, the headache is an event that you live through (what you call np-experience) but it is an internal event that no one else can participate in. My headache’s are mine ina way that my private room is not.

” But as I don’t buy the premise that one’s experience can get things wrong, or that it is needed in order to explain the cases of illusions and hallucinations,”

I don’t think that you really believe this, as you assume that there is an object out there and that it can be different from the way that the object appears…

Finally, so if we take what you say in the last paragraph and apply it to headaches then we get that the experience of a headace involves the headache, myself and the act of feeling the headache?

So, I agree that it comes naturally in those cases, but I think it comes naturally as a theoretical explanation, or re-interpretation of what has been known as np-sense experience before that in order to handle those issues (illusion, hallucination, dreams, etc…) But as I don’t buy the premise that one’s experience can get things wrong, or that it is needed in order to explain the cases of illusions and hallucinations, that’s why I don’t think that p-sense experience is really useful theoretical assumption.

BTW I agree with you on externalism, however I think that ‘experience’ itself should also be read in externalist manner. In such sense the experience includes the rabbit, myself, and the act of seeing (with all its characteristics – where one looks from, how the thing is rotated, what are light conditions, etc…).

as for teaching it to someone…it seems that it would ocme naturally IF you buy the premise that sometimes your experience gets things wrong (which I suppose that you don’t)…but the common sense view is that it LOOKS like the stike is bent when it is in the water, and then I see that it is not REALLY bent, the moon LOOKLS like it is really small but I know that REALLY it is very large, and etc…this would lead naturally to a person realizing that they had p-experience…or if you don’t like that example, think about this. Say that as a kid you have a really intense itch on your back and you want to get someone to itch it…but you can’t do a good job of describing where it is on yoir back and they can’t find it…that will make you start to think that there is something about your p-experience that only you know about…I could go on…

A couple of other details…I said ‘conscious events’ which makes it clear that we are talking about conscious mental states, not transitive consciousness (that is being conscious of things)…so I agree that there is consciousness involved in np-experience, but that doesn’t matter as it is a different kind of consciousness…

Finally, if one is an externalists, like I am, then when one talks about the experience of the rabbit one needs to talk about the rabbitt….

If I point to someone that “experience” is when he is seeing something, or when he is hearing something, why would that person figure out that I’m talking about p-sense experience, and not the np-sense experience – i.e. events that he lived through. “Conscious” doesn’t help, as np-sense experience involves consciousness too. So, I don’t think it can be done by just “simple-pointing” to concrete events, or to abstractions from it.

Here is some confused idea I have of how the pointing to the p-sense experience is supposed to work… I think that it would first involve teaching a person a theory about the world, namely that the world is physical, and how it causally affects our senses, and that there is a brain in our head; and now that person left with the obvious gap between the world as described by physics and the world of np-experiences is supposed to make some theoretical switch in interpreting his/her np-experiences.

However even the p-experience is a part of this interpretation (explanation), I fail to see what it does explain. It can’t explain np-experiences as they are about events in the world that one has witnessed, and hence when we talk about np-experience of seeing a rabbit, we need to talk about the rabbit as much as we talk about the photons, the eyes and the brain. But as p-experience is supposed to supervene on the brain, it can’t include the rabbit…

And there I ended up confusing myself searching for this p-experience thingy.

My problems with philosophers’ sense of “experience” is this… Let’s say that one can teach the student the meaning of the word by ostension, or by description/definition, or by presenting a theory in which whatever is referred to by “experience” will appear as a theoretical notion which will be used to explain some other things which can be observed. But can philosophers’ experience be pointed to? Or described/defined? Pete said that it is theoretical notion, but he didn’t give much explanation what is it supposed to explain.

BTW, I’m not sure what to think about transitivity principle, as it involves issues that I haven’t thought of (e.g. the intransitive consciousness). So, I will have to remain silent on it.

“3 a: the conscious events that make up an individual life”

This is closer to what philosophers are talking about…

Also, you are looking up ‘experience’ as a noun, it is also a transitive verb ‘experience of’…

Finally, you seem tot hink that representational theories are only first-order theories like Tye and Dretske, but higher-order theories are representational, and as I have already said, you certaily seem to endorse the transitivity principle…