Scientific evidence has a broader conception of the traditional one because it includes both the experience immediately observable by the sensitive subject and both indirect, apparent from data that can not fall within the common sensibility, such as those that come from other proven and verified observations, associated to this type of phenomena.
In this way it is vastly broadened the concept of experience that in addition to conventional sensory and emotional factors today includes logical, mathematical and technological advances that make it more complex the epistemological interpretation.
A more accurate analysis of the concept of experience was conducted by Plato who distinguished between the opinions formed on the basis of practical experience, and those which used the intellect to process real reasoning; experience also allows to form the rules of a method by which practicing neatly every practical activity.
Plato does not deny the importance of experience, but rather wants to justify it, giving an ontological foundation to sensitive phenomena based on the ideas that experience itself leads to awaken in the human mind.
The interest of Aristotle to the knowledge of nature is confirmed by the numerous and extensive analyses he carried out on the concept of experience defining it as a set of feelings and memory made possible by induction, the ability to grasp the universal through the particular. This explains why "the animals have little experience," while "men from many reflections on experience form a single general opinion around similar cases." Hence the art, practical activity "since many memories of the same object constitute together the value of experience" which is "knowledge of particular cases, while art is awareness of the universal 'and' causes "through philosophizing. Deadline of human activity is science, superior to art, because in that knowledge is pure and disinterested while art is subjected to practical purposes.
This aspect of the relationships that determine the ordered structure of experience was thoroughly analyzed by John Locke and David Hume and became central to modern epistemology which poses the question of whether those relationships simply result from an accumulation of pure information that will cause in the end the 'order of experience, as claimed sensism or positivist materialism, or is it rationality which, occurring predominantly, establish that order, as it was in the doctrines of Leibniz, of idealism and spiritualism of the late nineteenth century; or if finally, in an intermediate position, it recognizes an independent partnership between experience and reason as in Kant, in the neo-criticism, in the neo-realism and the phenomenology of Husserl to Hartmann.
With the rise and spread of Darwin's evolutionary theory the problem of the relationship between experience and reason became complicated with the new issue of the origin and development of the human spirit. Contrasted two theories: that nature, which is headed by Spencer, according to which even those that are considered innate properties of the intellect are in fact the result of a natural evolution and that historicist, that comes with Hegel, according to which the human spirit was created and developed according to the historical conditions in which he lives and works.
The discussion then moved and expanded in terms of psychology, on the one hand, with the radical empiricism of William James, pragmatism, phenomenology, psychology of form has questioned the mental atomism of David Hume and John Stuart Mill and, on the other hand, with experimental psychology and phenomenologists, criticized as unsustainable each spiritualist theory of inner experience as those advanced by Maine de Biran.
Galileo and, before him, Copernicus managed to convince the world that experience of reality requires a critical attitude, as experience in itself is not something identical to the world of objects. It is true that experience is the touchstone of the theory, however now the everyday experience, to be true, it must be transformed into scientific experience. And this transformation must follow basic guidelines:
before deciding on the 'why', you have to answer the question of 'how'. To do this you must set up the building (more or less simulated) of experimental situations in which the observation of phenomena 'at a pure state' is possible. The data of experience are used to formulate hypotheses about the fundamental structure of reality, usually expressed in mathematical language.
According to the view of scientists like Galileo, experience is not the basis from which we can draw the basic truth of a theory, because it can always cheat. Experience and then experiment can at best 'suggest’ new ideas, while their main function is to be tools of verification of the theory by comparing its ultimate consequences with empirical data.
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