ABSTRACT
One cannot include everything about one’s ideas every time one writes so I must refer readers to my earlier book (D.B. Stern, 1997) for a description of the theory of unformulated experience. However, there are points about those views that should be reiterated at the outset of this book, at least briefly, because they are crucial and frequently misunderstood. First, the question of relativism. I conceive unformulated experience as potential experience, and I intend by that point to suggest that the shape of the next moment’s formulated meanings is not entirely predetermined, that there is always some ambiguity to be resolved in experience, some formulation of the unformulated that remains to take place, some emergent quality in the creation of whatever is to come next. At times this position about the inevitable ambiguity of the next moment has been mistakenly interpreted to imply that the process of formulation is unconstrained, as if unformulated experience can become any meaning one pleases to give it. That is not what I believe (D.B. Stern, 1997, pp. 28-32, 203-233). I want to avoid altogether the implication of relativism and unconstrained subjectivism. The idea of unformulated experience is a hermeneutic view well described by Sass (1988): “For, though it may be impossible to discover a single meaning, this does not mean that anything goes, that listeners can legitimately ascribe any meaning to any discourse. The hermeneutic view is a sort of ‘middle way’ between objectivism and relativism” (p. 254).1
