ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to focus on some aspects of the problem raised by those who are in doubt about whether it is possible to describe direct experiences. For radically different reasons, some influential members of the Vienna Circle argued that elementary statements about the facts, i.e. “protocol propositions”, are the ultimate data for scientific experience. In phenomenological research the formulas used to represent systems of relationships are more complex, since the point is not only to express a group of one-many relationships between changes affecting a simple distal stimulus and changes occurring in the domain of direct experience. Protocol propositions of this kind are excellent for describing the nature of a visual experience and have the same intersubjective communicability that must be attributed to geometrical propositions used to refer – for instance – to the bodies that are the subject-matter of mechanics.
