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 and 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-evidence experience and sense-are exactly such linchpins. Using a rigorous plain language approach to meaning analysis she unpackages 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 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.