Scientific experience has a broader conception than the traditional one because it includes both the direct experience, that is immediately observable in its evidence by a sensitive subject, and the indirect one, obtainable from data that can not fall within the common sensibility, such as those concerning the cosmological or subatomic phenomena, but which originate from other ascertained and verified observations, linked to this type of phenomena.
This is derived from Wikipedia that sustains as scientific experience will be followed by the "artificial" operation of the scientist who organizes sensitive data by inserting them into patterns of statistical nature, as in the ‘experientia litterata’ by Francis Bacon neatly done by writing the data in tabulae , or as through the experiment by Galilee, who drives natural phenomena demonstrating a theory.
In this way the concept of experience has been vastly broadened which in addition to conventional sensory and emotional elements, now includes the intervention of logic, mathematics and technology which complicates 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 who used the intellect to process real reasoning; experience also allows to form the rules of a method by which to practice neatly every applied activity. Plato therefore 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 numerous analyses he conducted on the concept of experience defining it as a set of feelings and memory made possible by induction, namely the ability to grasp the universal through the particular.
The main problem, once gained confidence in empirical data drawn from reason, was to determine how the acquired knowledge could be attributed to experience or reason.
According to the empiricists,that of intellect would be an empty and inconclusive activity with no empirical data due to the sensitive reception. It was necessary, however, to distinguish the elements ‘primi’ and immediate of experience, feelings and impressions, from those relationships between the sensitive data that serve to organize and sort them and without which the empirical data would be a chaotic mixture of feelings. This aspect of the relationships that determine the ordered structure of the 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 the end of the order of the experience. It was claimed by sensationalism or positivist materialism, or if it is rationality which, intervening predominantly, establish that order, as it was in the doctrines of Leibniz, of idealism and spiritualism of the late nineteenth century. Finally, in an intermediate position, it is recognized an independent partnership between experience and reason as in Kant, the neo-criticism, in the neo-realism and the phenomenology of Husserl to Hartmann.
With the emergence 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. Two theories contrasted each other: the naturalistic, that 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 the historicist, that comes with Hegel, according to which the human spirit was created and developed according to the historical conditions in which it 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 made by the French philosopher Maine de Biran.
Copernicus and Galileo were able to convince the world that the experience of reality requires a critical attitude, as experience in itself is not something identical to the world of objects. It is true that the 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 three 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 the 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.
In order to combine the hypothesis expressed mathematically by experience, it is necessary that experience itself is organized metrically, or that the data of experience are expressed quantitatively.
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 the experiment can at best 'suggest' new ideas, and their main function is to be tools of verification of the theory by comparing its ultimate consequences with the empirical data.
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