Experience is a term often used to denote what happens inside a person or organism. This term was reformulated by Charles Peirce and other American pragmatists to denote what happens between the Self and the world.
In its first sense, the term “subjective experience” is pleonastic or redundant. It is analogous, for example, to a “deceptive liar.” But the concept of experience as essentially subjective or private according to many semioticians, especially those with roots in Peircian semiotics, is denied. For them, an experience is a form of dialogue, it is an ongoing exchange between consciousness, living beings, and their world.
As a consequence of this exchange, human organisms acquire the ability to communicate with themselves (i.e., think) and to have a secret refuge within themselves.
From this, the true meaning of inner life is born. But this life must be understood as it is – a subordinate and complex process. What is primary and additional is the dialogue between the Self and the other. In this sense, experience is what is implied by the German word Erlebnis (experience) – the existing changing process of living through multiple overlapping situations and, moreover, the accumulated product of this process.
John Deely offers an internal semiotic description of human experience: “The semiotic point of view is the perspective that results from a consistent attempt to live and follow the consequences of a simple realization – our whole experience – of its most primitive origin in perceptions to his finest achievements in the field of understanding – is a network of sign relations “(1990, 13).
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