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By experience, I mean all the content that I receive, which I have sub-divided into three categories:

  1. Percepts, the content corresponding to the different senses (sight, hearing, olfaction, taste, tactile sensation, etc.)
  2. Emotion, including content like happiness, sadness, anger, etc.
  3. Thoughts, further sub-divided into the categories of concepts and propositions (strings of concepts).

I have a few problems with these divisions. First of all, I wonder if I am missing something. I haven't exactly sat down and thought about this really hard (although I intend to, I just want to do some research, hence my post here). I have thought of at least one category that seems to not really fit in anywhere. If I, in my head, exclaim; what does the exclamation constitute? If I say ouch, that constitutes an experience; I can "hear" it in my head. Is it merely a percept then? But it has meaning beyond that; associations. Does that matter? This also raises the question of whether things we hear/see in our heads are percepts, or thoughts. If they're thoughts, that suddenly makes whether a given object of experience is a thought or a percept, which is problematic.

Another problem is whether or not emotions and percepts are really distinct. Their experienced difference seems (to me) to stem from the experience that emotions are internal, but percepts external. But I don't know; their difference seems weaker than that between emotions/percepts versus thoughts.

So, in summary, I am just looking for treatments of experience and how it can/ought to be divided.

user1113719
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  • I think you should first research a bit by yourself on Google or the [SEP](https://plato.stanford.edu/) and then come back with any, more specific, doubts that may have arised. Otherwise, I feel this question is too broad. –  Feb 25 '23 at 17:32
  • i don't think that the experience is the "content someone receives". Experience is something that not a content, mistakes for example. – άνθρωπος Feb 25 '23 at 17:52
  • @άνθρωπος The word *experience* is ascribed to many things. One of those things is the practical knowledge gained through life, for example; i.e. "I have 50 years of experience in IT". I am not talking about that. I am talking about something more fundamental; I am talking about the totality of all the content you receive. In there, is the knowledge gained from your mistake, as well as your memories pertaining to it. The mistake itself was, from your point of view, a collection of experiential objects across time. Externally, the mistake was a series of action(s). – user1113719 Feb 25 '23 at 18:23
  • you feel the content - because you have experience, you limit the content because you have experience. You are trying to get definition to experience, but it is a reason of the existence of anything. – άνθρωπος Feb 25 '23 at 19:08
  • @άνθρωπος I am not trying to get the definition of experience; I am simply trying to sub-divide it into its types. – user1113719 Feb 25 '23 at 22:05
  • @user1113719 this is not experience, this is sub-dividing of content(?), of information - neuro-impulses, Pavlov had 2 distinctions the first is sensory and second one is "words" based signal systems. No emotions. – άνθρωπος Feb 25 '23 at 22:55
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    Emotional feelings are certainly a part of the content of experience. – David Gudeman Feb 26 '23 at 00:42
  • @άνθρωπος, you are misunderstanding what the word "experience" means in philosophy. Please stop arguing about it; you are wrong. – David Gudeman Feb 26 '23 at 00:44
  • @DavidGudeman Thank you for caring, i know what is experience mean. Emotions are not same as sense feeling, emotions is a part of "language"(2 SS) that connected to biological instinct associations, it is little bit more "difficult", then simple signs, because more hormones less definiteness, but you are misunderstanding with this. – άνθρωπος Feb 26 '23 at 00:59
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    @άνθρωπος, you have clearly never read any philosophy about this topic and are appealing to how the word is used generically or possibly in psychology. Please stop pretending to have expertise that you don't have. You will spread misinformation. – David Gudeman Feb 26 '23 at 01:19
  • @DavidGudeman don't be nervous, ofc you are right, we have different meaning words in the bakery and in the all other language, your arguments is so truthly i haven't ever read anything like this. I'll try not to touch "the bakery words" any more. – άνθρωπος Feb 26 '23 at 01:55
  • @DavidGudeman Per - to try, risk, ex- "out of, from within". Experiment - out of try. How did you trying emotions - i ll try to angry, or i ll risk to happy? i really donno. – άνθρωπος Feb 26 '23 at 02:13

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One way to approach these kinds of questions is to break things down into contrary alternatives: is it X or not X? The nice feature of this approach is that it lets you be confident that you have covered all of the possible cases if not all of the interesting divisions. In this example, I would suggest:

  1. All experience is either perceptual or non-perceptual. What I mean by perceptual is not that it comes from the senses, but that it has the quality of sense perception, like a sound or a sight. Dreams and hallucinations are perceptual in this sense.
  2. All perceptual experience is either sensory or non-sensory. Non-sensory perceptual experience includes dreams and hallucinations. Note that this is a logical distinction. There is no implicit claim that it is always possible to tell which perceptual experiences are sensory and which are not.
  3. All experience is either propositional or non-propositional. Propositional experience is a thought that may be true or false. It includes things like beliefs, knowledge, speculation, etc.
  4. All non-perceptual, non-propositional experience is either aesthetic or non-aesthetic. An aesthetic experience is some sort emotional reaction or desire. Note, it's not any experience that provokes an emotional reaction or desire such as the (perceptual) sight of a puppy or the (propositional) belief that you have been wronged, it is the emotional reaction or desire itself.

Sometimes you have overlapping categories such as the perceptual/non-perceptual and propositional/non-propositional categories. In these cases, you have four potential categories: perceptual & propositional, perceptual & non-propositional, non-perceptual & propositional, and non-perceptual & non-propositional. Logically all four categories exist, but you might use insight to argue that, for example, no perceptual experience is propositional. In such a case, you might want to recategorize and say, for example, that propositional/non-propositional is a subcategory of non-perceptual.

David Gudeman
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  • Interesting. Where do you think exclamations would fit in? – user1113719 Feb 26 '23 at 02:07
  • @user1113719, I don't know what experience you are referring to as an exclamation. The only meaning I can give to that word is a verbal behavior. – David Gudeman Feb 26 '23 at 05:59
  • I was also willing to write it off as simply a verbal behavior which is only extrinsically experienced (that is, you perceive the sound of the exclamation). After thinking however, I believe exclamations are actually propositions. Thinking *ouch* is the same as thinking *that hurts*, and thinking *hurray* is the same as thinking *that's fantastic*. They're just synonymous propositions. – user1113719 Feb 26 '23 at 14:50