Against Epistemic Isolationism
Different “lived experiences” don’t mean we can’t understand one another
I am willing to bet that, sometime in the last decade or so, you heard the phrase “lived experience” once or twice. We are in the middle of nationwide realization that the experiences of some individuals in our society are not the same as they are for others. In this context I am reminded of a phrase I hear fairly regularly: “I could never know what it’s like to be an X” where X is the member of an identity category — whether race, sex, etc. What people mean, I take it, is that there is a kind of knowledge which has its origins in what is frequently called “lived experience.”
The notion of “lived experience” goes back at least to the hermeneutic philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey. Dilthey argued that if you want to understand human beings properly, you can’t go solely through the methods of the natural sciences. Put simply, if you imitate the methods of the natural sciences, you end up treating humans like specimens to be explained, not fellow humans to be understood.
Human beings are not like rocks, they have a mental life — one can ask “what it’s like” to be another person. Accordingly, one can’t simply analyze people from the outside — to look at data sets, say — and expect to understand them. One must have a sense of what…
