Experience
Experience consists of knowledge of or skill of some thing or some event gained through involvement in or exposure to that thing or event. The history of the word
experience aligns it closely with the concept of experiment. For example, the word experience could be used in a statement like: "I have experience in fishing". The concept of experience generally refers to know-how or procedural knowledge, rather than propositional knowledge: on-the-job training rather than book-learning. Philosophers dub knowledge based on experience "empirical knowledge" or "
a posteriori knowledge". The interrogation of experience has a long tradition in continental philosophy. Experience plays an important role in the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard. The German term
Erfahrung, often translated into English as "experience", has a slightly different implication, connoting the coherency of life's experiences. A person with considerable experience in a specific field can gain a reputation as an expert. Certain religious traditions and educational paradigms with, for example, the conditioning of military recruit-training, stress the experiential nature of human epistemology.