A few days ago I wrote about a decisive turning point in human history: the transition from experience to experiment. Experimentation allows us to see more clearly and produces more reliable knowledge. When Europeans moved from relying on experience to relying on experiments, they shed an astonishing number of errors and acquired the ability to solve problems that had previously seemed insoluble.
I wrote that the difference lies in what I called the “logical apparatus,” and several readers have asked what exactly I meant by that.
Experience works in everyday life almost automatically. Things happen to us; sensory impressions flow into our minds; they mingle with our personal beliefs, with the opinions of those around us, with what we read and hear — and eventually some kind of lesson emerges. From the very same events, I could draw entirely different conclusions if I approached them with different assumptions or discussed them with different people. Our ambitions also play a major role: memory is always shaped by our visions of the future. The same applies to experience itself. Experience is, by its nature, subjective and mutable over time.
An experiment may deal with the same event, but it approaches it differently. From the outset, I am seeking an answer to a clearly defined question, and I know in advance what conclusion follows from which outcome. The result is therefore reliable and objectively valid.
At this point, one might object that this distinction applies only to science or technical fields. Yes — and no. Everything we now resolve through experiment was once handled through experience. People knew that iron sinks and wood floats because their experience told them so — and that was true. But those same people also believed that bloodletting was a universal cure, because their experience seemed to confirm it — and that was false.
When a physician today tells the media, “Based on my experience in my practice, I know that…,” she is effectively dragging us back into the Middle Ages. What follows from such a claim is epistemologically unreliable, no matter how confident or well-intentioned the speaker may be.
None of this means that personal experience — in the sense of lived experience — is worthless. On the contrary, it is indispensable in shaping the human mind. In certain domains, especially in personal relationships, no amount of reliable knowledge can replace lived experience. But that has very little to do with the precision and reliability of knowledge itself.
Civilization advanced not because people accumulated more impressions, but because they learned to discipline their thinking — to separate subjective narrative from controlled inquiry, and intuition from evidence. Confusing these domains again is not progress. It is regression.