“Experience” in John Searle's account of the mind: Brain, mind, and Anglo culture

Abstract

This paper is part of a larger study that focuses on the word experience and its semantic history (in a broad outline). My 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 in its meanings, reflect, and provide evidence for, important cultural developments. The study argues that to understand Anglo culture and to see it in a historical and comparative perspective, we need to understand the meanings and the history of the word experience , and 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 key English word. The word experience plays a vital role in the ways of thinking of speakers of English, and 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; but there runs through several of these senses (the more recent ones) 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 (without distortion) into other languages, even European languages. What does the key English word experience mean, then, 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 a methodology is available in “NSM semantics,” whose basic tool is the “natural semantic metalanguage” (NSM), developed over three decades or so on the basis of empirical cross-linguistic investigations.