Private, Experiential Worlds
Speakers always come into a conversation from the two sides of an experiential gap. The gap is where the conversation takes place.
Again from The Instruction of Imagination:
The insistence on the private nature of experience, then, highlights the fact that every human individual, each of us, experiences the world in different ways. Every individual looks at the world from his or her own egocentric perspective; everyone carries a different baggage of memories, different private histories of interaction with different worlds. Every individual comes to rely on different strategies for understanding the world; each is by nature (and by enculturation) more deeply attuned to certain aspects of the world than to others. Different individuals have different attention spans; different perceptual capacities; a different talent for detail; a different eye for distinction; a different capacity and interest in generalization; different conceptions of the order of things, of what belongs with what, what is similar to what, what is the cause or effect of what. They have different ideas of what is beautiful, frightening, useful, important, or interesting. They are different in gender, age, social status, physical strength, emotional development, curiosity, patience, and anxiety level. Every human individual lives in a different experiential world. This, again, does not deny that there are similarities. If there were not any, we could not speak at all. It just highlights the fact that speakers always come into a conversation from the two sides of an experiential gap. The gap is where the conversation takes place. . . .
Each human individual lives in a private, experiential world that is different from that of the others, and is inaccessible to them. This is a foundational fact about our experiential nature, and it is the foundational obstacle to communication that language, as a social invention, set out to circumvent. Human cognition participates in the story of language not just as part of the origin, but also—much more importantly from the point of view of language—as the original problem that had to be solved by a social technology.
Consistent with our modernist turn a century ago, we do not often talk about "private, experiential worlds" as obstacles to communication that can be overcome. On the contrary, these private formats are to be celebrated, serviced, protected, even though, by definition, we can only pretend to have access to what we're protecting and celebrating. They may be expressions of deep meaning or total gibberish (or something in between). We assume the former, of course, but ultimately there is no way to tell without situating them inside our socially constructed, shared language.
