The Importance of Reasoned Experience

The Importance of Reasoned Experience

I would like to share with you some ideas about something we all have opinions about: the value of experience. Experience to me is a great teacher but I don't believe all experience is equally so.

From my past experience (no pun intended) with company selection of new employees, I know that years of experience is a poor predictor of candidate success. Studies show that people differ greatly in how well they learn from job experience. I believe the same holds for life experience. Some of us learn much from life experience; some of us learn little. I further believe that the difference between those who learn from experience and those who do not is that, for the quick learners, life is a reasoned experience. They insist on a cause, explanation, or justification for events over the course of a lifetime. As a child these inquirers often drove their parents nearly mad by continually asking "why".

As a result of their need for understanding why events occur, the inquirers become progressively more knowledgeable throughout their lives. And some of them become the people in a culture who are looked to for advice in their time and who serve as vehicles for the transmission of lore, the body of traditions and knowledge typically passed from person to person by word of mouth by participants of a culture.

This lore, built largely on collective reasoned experience probably has the potential to give a culture and its members an evolutionary advantage. Do you sense that individuals steeped in a culture with a powerful lore tend to achieve more during their lifetimes than do individuals whose cultures have less powerful lores? And does a powerful lore help a culture itself to thrive and survive over long time periods.

A form of reasoned experience that we seldom consider is the so-called "thought experiment". Not really an experiment at all, the thought experiment is selective observation, typically but not exclusively by scientists, of events occurring in imagined circumstances. For example, Einstein used a thought experiment to develop his Special Relativity Theory. In the thought experiment, Einstein imagined that he was traveling at the same speed as a light ray. He then used what he saw in his imaginary experience to develop his Special Relativity Theory. A reading of Martin Cohen's book, Wittgenstein’s Beetle and Other Classic Thought Experiments, indicates that most of the important advances in knowledge of the past had their genesis in a thought experiment. I hasten to add that "real" experiments were then used to confirm the thought experiments. And this suggests what I believe is the proper role for the experiment. [1]

The experiment can be properly seen as a powerful way to further our learning through reasoned experience. However, while experiments then have an important supportive role in furthering the advance of knowledge, they are not the primary drivers of advances in knowledge that we often appear to assume they are.

What are your thoughts concerning reasoned experience?
Notes:
1. The thought experiment is described in a broader context in my book Donald W. Jarrell, At the Edge of Time: Reality, Time, and Meaning in a Virtual Everyday World (North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012, 2014.) See especially pages 33-37. See At the Edge of Time.

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