Enriching experience

Abstract

The variety in human experience is enormous, even more so in potential. How do people enrich their experience of the world? Not every new experience enriches in the sense I’m after. Rather, I’m interested in experience that is novel, insofar as it adds to the repertoire of interaction with the world.
To describe how people interact with the world, in experience, I make use of the parallels in the work of John Haugeland and Alva Noë (a comparison absent from the literature). Both believe perception and thought are continuous in that all experience is skill based. They say experience is an activity, it consists in exercising the skills constitutive of the corresponding experiences as such. Both Haugeland and Noë call these skills understanding, meaning understanding is the practical ability to experience things in their possibility.
I conclude that people enrich their experience of the world through gaining novel forms of understanding.

Date of Award	30 Jun 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of St Andrews University of Stirling
Supervisor	Michael Wheeler (Supervisor)