Two concepts of experience: singular and general

The purpose of the article is to make a distinction between two concepts of experience, singular and general. They track two ways in which we connect experientially to the world. The former is captured by the idea of “having an experience”; the latter is captured instead by the idea of “having experience”. Classical and contemporary pragmatists contribute to this distinction, and the article explores some of their views. Finally the article indicates some consequences of the distinction. In fact, in the spirit of Peirce’s pragmatic maxim, those consequences are the very meaning of the conceptual distinction at stake, since they point out how we inferentially treat in different ways the fact of having an experience and the fact of having experience.