Experience, evidence, and sense

This book is based on two ideas: first, that any language-English no less than any other-represents a universe of meaning, shaped by the history and experience of the men and women who have created it; second, that in any language certain culture-specific words act as linchpins for whole networks of meanings, and that penetrating the meanings of those key words can therefore open our eyes to an entire cultural universe. In this book Anna Wierzbicka demonstrates that three uniquely English words-experience, evidence, and sense-are exactly such linchpins. Using a rigorous plain language approach to meaning analysis, she unpacks the dense cultural meanings of these key words, disentangles their multiple meanings, and traces their origins back to the tradition of British empiricism. In so doing she reveals much about cultural attitudes embedded not only in British and American English, but also other global varieties of English. An interdisciplinary work, Experience, Evidence, and Sense is accessible to both scholars and students in linguistics and English, as well as historians of ideas, sociologists, anthropologists, literary scholars, and scholars of communication.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Philosophy. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.