In epistemology, experience is the direct and characteristic epistemic (usually perceptual) contact with that which is presented to a cognitive source of information (mental faculties such as perception, memory, imagination, and introspection).

For some philosophers (Descartes, for example), what is given to any of these faculties is experience (although he does not use that word, but rather the word thought).

Experience is not a product of its content or input, the experienced, nor is it reduced to the experimentation of the experienced. It is direct contact with a certain content in the characteristic way of experiencing that content.

When looking at a computer screen, each person has the characteristic experience of a computer screen.

Looking at grass provides a characteristic grassy experience. Drinking wine provides a characteristic wine experience.

Wilhelm Dilthey (Studies on the Foundations of the Human Sciences, 1883 and Theory of Worldviews, 1910) and Hans-Georg Gadamer (Truth and Method, 1960) discuss this issue using two distinct German terms

Erlebnis would be the immediate and lived experience as a unified reality, and Erfahrung would be the reflected experience.