Experiential Knowing

Experiential knowing is the ground form of knowing in what Heron and Reason refer to as ‘extended epistemology’, including experiential, presentational, propositional and practical knowing. In their everyday lives, people use these four forms of knowing and implicitly engage with them in different ways. Individuals cultivate their knowing through direct experience; they voice it through expressive imageries, such as stories, the arts and performances; they make sense of it through propositions that are intelligent to them and then they use it for their actions in their lives. These four forms of knowing are the essential bases for action research.

This entry discusses experiential knowing and experiential knowledge, as well as its relevance to participatory research. It also includes ways of knowing within the framework of action research.

Experiential knowing, at its simplest meaning and as defined by Heron and Reason, refers to individuals' direct familiarity with other people, objects, events and places that they personally encounter in their lives. It is implicit, but the moment the experiential knowing is cultivated, it becomes real to the knowers. Experiential knowing can also be simply put as ‘felt’ knowing. It is through people's subjective feelings and what they emotionally embody in the presence of others and the world that they come to know about other things. Often, it is difficult to express verbally and to explain to others, and it certainly cannot be captured objectively.

Additionally, experiential knowing signifies knowing that individuals cultivate by recalling their experiences: things that they learn or acquire tacitly (e.g. how to ride a bicycle). It also means people's perceptual experiences or understanding of things (such as what it is like to give birth, to live in poverty or to have HIV/AIDS). It makes use of their unconscious or implicit thinking and knowing, rather than relying on explicit propositional knowledge. The focus of experiential knowing is on situated and everyday existence as it unravels to the knowers, rather than the knowing that is imposed by outsiders.

Experiential knowing is instinctive and unknown to logic because individuals cultivate their knowing without having to consciously think about how it is known. This way of knowing unfolds from many forms of practices, including what people do in their everyday life. They use sight, sound, smell and touch to sense the things around them. Through their sense making and feelings, they can claim to have experiential knowing. They represent their experiential knowing in the form of idioms, such as stories and creative activities, as in the arts.

Experiential knowing is also intuitive because it coexists with the feelings of knowing, which often leads to some motive for action. To experience something is to embody it and to feel it, to know that it exists. In order to experience something, one must take part in it. To take part is to create and to realize. Thus, experiential knowing is inevitably both subjective and objective, and relational to both the knowers and what is known. The knowing is instantaneous and less immediately intervened by propositional knowing. When a person becomes HIV positive, his or her experience includes the subjective experience of living with HIV and the feelings of relief when having access to antiretroviral therapy, as well as the objective act of adhering to medications and having to deal with other disruptions in his or her life. This experiential knowing may be accompanied, for example, by the propositional knowing that his or her life is prolonged as long as medication adherence is strictly observed.

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