What does it mean that the raw material of meaning is experience?

Your lived experience is the material from which you construct meaning.

Example: Two people sit in the same hospital waiting room on the same Tuesday afternoon. One is a thirty-year-old who has never been seriously ill. For her, the sterile lighting, the muted television, the low hum of anxiety in the room register as unpleasant but abstract — a bureaucratic inconvenience. The other is a fifty-five-year-old who sat in a nearly identical room twelve years ago waiting to learn whether his wife would survive surgery. For him, the fluorescent flicker, the particular shade of institutional green on the walls, the sound of a name being called from behind a door — every sensory detail is saturated with meaning. The room has not changed between them. The raw material has. The second person has lived through something that permanently altered what a hospital waiting room means, and no amount of philosophical argument could transfer that meaning to the first person. Experience is not a mere input to the meaning-making process. It is the substance out of which meaning is built.

Try this: Set a timer for thirty minutes. Sit with a blank page or open document. Choose a single experience from your life — not an event described in a sentence, but an experience recalled in its full sensory and emotional texture. Write continuously about that experience, focusing not on the facts of what happened but on what it felt like from the inside: what you saw, heard, smelled, felt in your body, felt emotionally, thought at the time, and what the experience meant to you then versus what it means to you now. When the timer ends, read what you wrote and underline every sentence where the meaning you describe could only have come from having lived through that specific experience — where no amount of reading or secondhand description could have produced the same understanding. Count those sentences. That count is a measure of how much meaning-material this experience deposited in your epistemic inventory.