Experience and Knowledge: A Complementary Approach

Extract

[...] Summary I. Certainly, experience is a major step in the process of building knowledge - From experience to knowledge: when immersion in nature through the senses allows for deducing truths and building a body of knowledge - To experiment is to testify and report on an experience, made significant and valued by knowledge a priori II. However, and despite claiming autonomy, experience remains insufficient, sometimes surpassable - The only experience creates mainly the illusion of knowing and not knowledge, in so far as the latter requires the collaboration of reasoning and analysis. [...]

[...] Insufficiency of experience If experience can be potentially initiatory of knowledge, it remains nonetheless insufficient to the point of being sometimes surpassable. Dissociated from the support of learned knowledge and reason, experience alone loses a good part of its credibility, to the extent that it seems to create above all the illusion of knowing and not knowledge. Multiplying perceptions and storing facts do not represent true knowledge, because the meaning would be lacking in the whole. Indeed, Canguilhem affirms the non-existence of knowledge outside of or independently of analysis. It necessarily requires the collaboration of reasoning and brute knowledge. [...]

[...] That this experience is the initiator of knowledge does not mean that 'all knowledge derives from it' as Kant affirms. In fact, other paths are called upon to create a complete knowledge and even attempt to surpass empiricism, all the more so since the collected facts and concocted observations do not form a cognition. Consequently, the quest for knowledge may eventually disdain this procedure and rely only on book knowledge and abstract reasoning. From there, we concluded the need to value the interdependence between these approaches and invest in them in order to build the foundations of a living knowledge in continuous development. [...]

[...] Kant establishes experience as an initial step to knowledge and knowledge, in that it does not necessarily require prior learned knowledge and that it founds knowledge on lived experience and the mediation of the senses. Nevertheless, he notes that it does not come entirely from experience. A statement that seems to recall the inability of this activity to elaborate knowledge in total independence. In this case, Kant raises the problem of the origin of cognition and the factors that, apart from experience, contribute to its construction. Therefore, from The knowledge of life de G. [...]

[...] To congratulate oneself on the sufficiency of experience or to regret its sometimes secondary status is a matter of partial and biased judgment. Indeed, the works cited above show that when conducted separately, abstract knowledge, experience, and logical reasoning prove to be powerless. Therefore, it is necessary to promote complementarity between these different paths leading to knowledge, knowing that they are naturally interdependent. A relationship that the narrator of the Mur Invisible was established in the following terms: was looking for information in all the almanacs but in vain. [...]