The Meanings of Experience

Abstract

The categories of “experience” and “experiment” lay at the heart of the conceptions of natural knowledge that dominated European learning at both the beginning and the end of the Scientific Revolution. The Latin words generally used to denote “experience” in both the medieval and early modern periods, experientia and experimentum , were generally interchangeable, with no systematic distinction between them except in particular contexts to be discussed; both are related to the word peritus , meaning skilled or experienced. Besides these terms and their vernacular cognates, another related Latin term, periculum (“trial” or “test”), began to be used in the late sixteenth century to designate the deliberate carrying out of an experiment ( periculum facere ), initially in the mathematical sciences. By the end of the seventeenth century, the construal of experience as “experiment” in this sense had acquired a wide and influential currency. At the start of the sixteenth century, scholastic versions of Aristotelian natural philosophy dominated the approach to knowledge of nature that informed the official curricula of the universities (see the following chapters in this volume: Blair, Chapter 17; Garber, Chapter 2); Aristotle’s writings stress repeatedly the importance of sense experience in the creation of reliable knowledge of the world. Nonetheless, during the seventeenth century, many of the proponents of what came to be called by some (rather obscurely) “the new science” criticized the earlier orthodoxy of what Aristotelian natural philosophy (or “physics”) had become on the grounds that it paid insufficient attention to the lessons of experience. For example, Francis Bacon (1561–1626) wrote in his New Organon of 1620 that Aristotle “did not properly consult experience… after making his decisions arbitrarily, he parades experience around, distorted to suit his opinions, a captive.”