Thread: Is only personal experience valid, or is experience + information better?

Lately I've run across the experiential viewpoint a few times on this message board, which as I understand it states that only personal experience counts as knowledge - ie anything you learn from textbooks tutorials or word of mouth is to be treated as if it doesn't exist.

Am I misunderstanding it? Overstating it? If so please let me know, because this sounds foolish to me. I mean I can understand saying that you shouldn't blindly trust everything you read, but things that have been scientifically evaluated in peer-reviewed journals and accepted as facts shouldn't be discarded out of hand simply because you personally didn't run the experiments.

As a civilization, we've made most of our progress by standing on the shoulders of giants - beginning where established learning of others has left off. If it were necessary for each of us to begin by re-inventing the wheel for instance, the automotive industry would consist of hand-built wooden carts. Say what you may about the environmental aspects of the automotive industry, it's a branch of human industry/accomplishment that has advanced staggeringly because the people involved were smart enough to first study what's been done by those who came before - to discard steam engines for example because they read that others had tried it and discovered that internal combustion works better.

I'll readily agree that not all information is accurate - but that's no reason to toss the baby out with the bathwater and reject all book learnin'!

While it's true that information we haven't earned might be slightly less valuable than that which we've discovered ourselves, it's also true that personal experience without understanding is useless. Before the scientific age people trusted their own experience to tell them everything, and came to a lot of wrong conclusions that common sense suggested.

It seems only prudent to me to accept both experience and information, since together they form a gestalt much greater than either alone. In fact it seems they can provide checks and balances on each other - a sort of in-progress course correction.

Discuss.