Experientialism is the philosophical theory that experience is the source of knowledge. It was originally formulated by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson and its first widely known formulation is to be found in the book Metaphors We Live By.
In Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, Lakoff has expanded on the foundation of experientialism by his research into the nature of categories.
Basic realism
This philosophy is especially a response to the objectivist tradition of transcendental truth most prominently formulate by Immanuel Kant. Although experientialism states that there is no "purely rational" detached God's-eye view of the world which is external to human thought, it still admits that there exists what Lakoff and Johnson call basic realism. Most importantly this involves a commitment to the existence of a real world external to human beings and the possibility of stable knowledge of the external world.