Three Essays on Experience

Experience is, we think, a distinctive type of occurrence, and philosophers have thought hard about its nature and our knowledge of it. One tradition of thought is that deriving from Wittgenstein, who fundamentally rejects an account of experience as private and develops a picture in which we do not properly count as responding to our own experiences by describing them. Two of the projected papers aim to show this picture is mistaken. Another tradition sees importance and illumination in the notion that experiences are like to something to undergo. The third paper asks whether this is so, and it argues that this way of speaking combines virtual viciousness with a cluster of serious mistakes. The aim is to undermine these two paradigms so to better re-characterize experience as in an important sense, private, to explain how the subject of the experiences him or herself knows about them, and to say in an informative way what is distinctive of the category of experience.