Experience Transfer |
Working Definition:
experience transfer The transfer from the memory of past experiences into a virtual experience analogous to another person's experience. A null experience transfer is the transfer into memory occasioned by a virtual experience of a null experience.
Disciplinary Definitions:
"Experience transfer" is not a technical term. I use it analogously to the term, "concept transfer."
Comments:
The key to filling an experience gap is an experience transfer. Dilthey’s account of interpersonal communication contains that element not only in his conception of Sichhineinversetzen but also in the inclusion of feeling, re-experiencing, and re-structuring worldviews. (Dilthey's Terms) An experience transfer requires a ”trans-script” (type of experience) as a structure in a larger structure of meaning and value.
I term the pocess of experience transfers ”configuring” and the resulting accomodated structure of experience, a ”configuration.” Like Dilthey, I believe configuring is a common everyday cognitive practice that, when developed systematically in specific projects, becomes a method of study. In the following sections of this chapter, I will take up each aspect of an experience transfer and relate it to current research in Cognitive Psychology. In latter chapters, I will develop these aspects further in relation to research in communication, modes of thinking, memory systems, narratology, new media, virtual reality, and cultural systems.
When we encounter persons unlike us and discover that we do not yet or can never experience what they have experienced, our only recourse is to substitute virtual experiences to fill the gap in our understanding. Virtual experiences require an expression that articulates the null experience. That expression needs to engender in us a positive feeling that can allow us to identify with the person unlike us. To identify with a positive feeling with another person’s experience requires us to recognize not only the contours of that unknown experience but also to undergo it or relive it in our imaginations since we cannot live it in our lives. This implies that we are able to transpose some of our past experiences into the shape of the null experience and to project that onto the other person. This cannot be done in a vacuum. The experience in question has to have purpose, value, and meaning in our belief system before we can say that we understand albeit in a limited way the other person
Notes
”To convey the nature of understanding, Dilthey employed terms such as "transposition," "projection," and "resubjectification," which connote a process of empathic identification. The German terms (Gleichsetzen, Sichhineinversetzen, Sich-ubertragen) suggest the adoption of the life-position or world-view of another . . .“ (Ermarth, Wilhelm Dilthey, 1981, 250)
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last revised:
June 13, 2007
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