Appearance of Experience as Form and Process

Theories of experience guide an understanding of how people’s conceptions of physical objects, events, and ideas are structured and organized. This article reviews how experience is understood as a phenomenon, a concept, and a category of phenomenology, pragmatics, and the experiential learning theory. Based on the review, the article discusses how existing theories of experience appear as static in a systemic view and are enriched when a dynamic view is added. The phenomenon of experience is analyzed as structured in recursive interactions between form and process in four layers, namely attention in sensing, categorization in perceiving, meaning in reflecting, and transformation in creating.