By ‘experience’ we usually mean an event or occurrence that a person lives through as an observer or a participant. In this sense, we all have ‘experiences’, otherwise we would be saying that we do not live through events or occurrences! However, there are, of course, different types of experience. For example, you can experience ‘coldness’ by putting your hand into a bucket of icy water, or you can experience laughter by watching a funny film. What typifies experience is that you are making use of your senses. This is something an empiricist (someone who relies on observation and experience of the world in order to obtain knowledge) would recognize as providing meaningful knowledge of our world.

Another kind of experience is if, say, you are in a room of people and you sense ‘friction’ between two people. The latter kind of experience cannot be directly touched, smelt, seen, heard or tasted but you can still express it to someone else in the room and they might say, “Yes, I experienced that too”. The empiricist would argue that you are basing this judgement on previous experiences of, for example, how people respond (facial expressions, body language, etc.) to each other when they've had an argument.