ABSTRACT
In his study of how certain habits of thought influence the form and content of scientific systems of belief, Howard Margolis (1993) is careful to distinguish between “experience” (as a form of embodied knowledge) and “experiment” (as a domain of self-conscious contrivance). The point of the distinction is not only to show just how unlike the experience of living experimental contrivances actually are, but to emphasize how different – even antithetical – are their behavioral paradigms. Whereas experiments by definition seek to eliminate uncertainty and to limit novelty to a controlled domain of observation, experiences are assessed by the quality of a response to the unexpected. Experiments strive for replicability as a mode of validation, whereas being “experienced” is measured by the degree to which an event transcends what is commonplace. Experimental truths are predictably replicable, experiential ones are often extraordinary. The constrained novelty of laboratory life works, it may even be said, against the singular novelty that makes for meaning in the domain of experience.
