Wierzbicka, Anna (2006). “Experience” in John Searle’s account of the mind: Brain, mind and Anglo culture. Intercultural Pragmatics, 3(3), 241-255. DOI: 10.1515/IP.2006.016
A more recent publication building on this one is chapter 2 (pp. 25-93) of:
Wierzbicka, Anna (2010). Experience, evidence, and sense: The hidden cultural legacy of English. New York: Oxford University Press.
This paper is part of a larger study that focuses on the word experience and its semantic history. Its main point is that this word plays now, and has played for a long time, an extremely important role in the thought world associated with the English language, and that the changes in its use and meanings reflect, and provide evidence for, important cultural developments. The study argues that, to understand Anglo culture and see it in a historical and comparative perspective, we need to understand the meanings and the history of the word experience. It also argues that, given the role of English in present-day science and the importance of experience in present-day English, we need to understand the cultural underpinnings of this English key word.
The word experience plays a vital role in the ways of thinking of speakers of English; it provides a prism through which they tend to interpret the world. Its range of use is very wide and includes a number of distinct senses. However, through several of these senses (the more recent ones) runs a common theme, which reflects a characteristically ‘‘Anglo’’ perspective on the world and on human life. This is why the word experience is often untranslatable into other languages, even European, without being semantically distorted.
What, then, does the English key word experience mean and how exactly does it differ from its closest counterparts in other languages or in earlier varieties of English?
To answer such questions, one needs to engage in some rigorous semantic analysis, both synchronic and diachronic. This requires a suitable methodology such as that provided by the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
