Lived experience and empirical knowledge: domination or integration?

I’ve been in and around professional addiction and recovery circles for more than 30 years.

In that time, I’ve spent a lot of time in rooms where empirical knowledge was a suffocating force. It determined what and who was valued, heard, and respected in ways that did not lead us any closer to truth or extend recovery to more people suffering from addiction.

In that time, I’ve also spent a lot of time in rooms where experiential knowledge was a suffocating force. It determined what and who was valued, heard, and respected in ways that did not lead us any closer to truth or extend recovery to more people suffering from addiction.

These scenarios represent power struggles between ways of knowing.

Recently, someone shared this article on the use of lived experience as a logical fallacy.

Experiences are often misleading. One danger in according near infallible epistemic status to lived experiences is that it downplays or even completely ignores the real possibility of error in these experiences. While one cannot be wrong that he is experiencing something, one can make erroneous inferences from that experience.

The Lived Experience Fallacy by Timothy Hsiao | Academic Questions (2022).

The article provides several examples of lived experience (experiential knowledge) leading to logical fallacies.

The article got several positive responses from surprising places. I imagine that’s because experiential knowledge has been a suffocating force in some of those places.

That article seems politically motivated, and I have a lot of thoughts about that, but let’s put that aside for a moment.

The article presents (at least) a couple of straw men. First, that lived experience is only deployed for “woke” motives to achieve political power. Second, that valuing lived experience means believing it’s infallible and should trump empirical knowledge.

That second straw man sets up the false choice between empirical OR experiential knowledge.

I give the author credit for putting his finger on a real issue, but he seems to have arrived at the wrong answer to the right question.

The question I have in mind is, how should we situate and integrate experiential knowledge with empirical knowledge?

I’ve asked several very wise, very experienced, and very knowledgeable scholars and practitioners to point me toward writing on this question. I have not received any useful recommendations.

I don’t know why that is.

I look forward to someone pointing me to good work on the subject, or someone rising to the challenge to write about it. In the meantime, those of us who really care about truth and recovery will have to carry the question and resist the tendency of each way of knowing to dominate the other.

It also made me think of Heschel’s quote. Maybe the act of attempting to integrate experiential knowledge with empirical knowledge will teach us the meaning of the act.