A study on Thomas Kuhn's Contribution to the Understanding of the Notion of Experience in Contemporary Epistemology

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to study the notion of experience in two traditions: the classic one and the modern one, and to analyze how contemporary thinking receives it, especially in what regards Thomas Kuhn’s Epistemology. The methodology adopted for this work is analytical and descriptive in order to let us examine the various elements involved in this notion. In classical philosophy, experience is the origin of universal knowledge. It is the link with reality. Experience is basically a habit which is capable of causing intellectual contemplation. With modern philosophy, the intelligible dimension -universal and metaphysical- of experience is abandoned, therefore interrupting the continuity of the cognitive process. Thomas Kuhn argues against the Neopositivism that dominated the first half of the Twentieth Century, which reduced experience to pure original data. He states that all experience is theory-laden, which means that everything that we experience depends not only on sensory information received by our senses, but also on the set of theoretical knowledge that we have previously acquired, whose action we are not aware of even at the moment of perception. The theoretical load of experience can be understood from a metaphysical approach to knowledge as the intelligible content of experience that allows it to be integrated with intellectual knowledge.