Chapter 17. Learning from Experience

1 In the K activity on which I am engaged, namely that of knowing, I have to be conscious of my emotional experience and able to abstract from it a statement that will represent this experience adequately. This abstraction engenders confidence if it then represents other experiences unknown when the abstraction is made. The sense of confidence is similar to that produced if a belief seems supported by common sense. Confidence is a concomitant of knowing that there is correlation between the senses (pp. 318, 320) or that more than one person in a group entertains what appears to be the same statement of the same representation of an emotional experience. Confidence in a representation is associated with (1) a belief that the representation is supported by common sense and (2) that it not only represents the emotional experience from which it is abstracted, but represents other realizations, unknown when the abstraction was accomplished. Thus an abstract formalization, employing the signs L, H and K used for the evaluation of one emotional experience, may itself be evaluated if it can be seen to serve as an abstract representation of a different emotional experience.

2 Abstraction, then, can be seen as a step in publication which facilitates correlation by comparison of the representation that has been abstracted with a number of different realizations none of which is the realization from which the representation was originally abstracted. The concretization, by contrast, can be seen as a form of publication which facilitates correlation by common sense; that is, by stating something so that it is recognized as an object of one sense that can yet be tested as an object of another sense. The criterion for the statement must be its value in facilitating testing by more than one sense or by the senses of more than one person. (In astronomy

correlations are achieved although only the sense of sight and its data are available because the individual discoverer has been a