experienceI’m sure all of you have heard someone claim that experience, not reason is the best guide for truth.  The best way to expose the fallacy of this sort of thinking is by responding, “That hasn’t been my experience.”  For those who claim feeling, not reason is the best guide for truth, respond by saying, “I don’t get the feeling that that’s true.”

The fact of the matter is that feeling and experience are not sufficient grounds for belief.  Everybody claims to have an experience.  Buddhists have an experience; Jehovah’s Witnesses have an experience; Mormon’s have an experience.  Whose experience is valid?  Who is interpreting their experience correctly?  What do you do when you have competing experiences?  What can serve as an arbiter?  It can’t be another experience, lest we find ourselves arguing in a circle.  We must appeal to something else that is public and objective rather than private and subjective.  That something is reason.  What reasons do we have to believe that the person’s belief-system is correct?  If no appeal to public evidence is provided, no meaningful discussion can transpire.

When we argue for truth based only on our experience, we cut off our own ability to persuade others of our view.  While our experience may be enough to convince us that what we believe is true, the non-believer cannot get at and evaluate our experience, and thus has no way of knowing whether our claims are true or not.  Arguing from experience, then, is a liability in that it prohibits you from being able to persuade anyone else that you are right.  This does not mean experience plays no role, for it does.  It can serve to support and confirm the rational case for our position; it simply cannot constitute the very grounds of our position.