The Furniture of Experience

This paper presents an account of the basic elements of experience, namely concepts, facts, and phenomena. By phenomenon, I mean simply something that is perceived by a person. I argue that a person creates a fact within their own world of experience by assenting to a concept. This does not mean that doing so creates any sort of objective truth in the sense of correspondence with a “real world” outside experience. As Kant pointed out, such correspondence cannot serve as a workable criterion for truth, so what remains is experiential truth. Assent, however, is not arbitrary: in deciding what to agree to, people apply certain rules to their experiential evidence, including deduction, induction, and abduction. These rules are an innate part of our nature. Because these rules are common to all people, and because we can communicate and share our experiences, it is possible to reach agreement about what is factual and thereby build a shared world of experience. This shared world is what we ordinarily think of as the “real world.”