Science and experience

Stating that experience is the testing ground for scientific theories is undoubtedly a sort of truism. In the case of the investigation of human perception, however, it is worth pinpointing and understanding exactly what kind of experience science must avail itself of. Cherishing and taking into account the lessons learned from Goethe’s Farben-lehre, Ewald Hering inaugurates a type of phenomenology which believed in the fertili-ty of the connection between the phenomenological description and the empirical inves-tigation. The direction indicated by Hering will be embraced by important authors of non-Husserlian phenomenology in the first three decades of the twentieth century: Carl Stumpf, Karl Bühler, the Gestaltpsychologie of Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka, to name a few. This paper intends to show the interest and topicality of this approach.