Abstract
Psychophysics is a branch of experimental psychology often described as being concerned with “the measurement of sensation”. Some of the field’s most important figures, like Gustav Fechner and S.S. Stevens, have viewed phenomenology - in the sense of the examination of the first-person experience of sensations and percepts - as playing a crucial role in psychophysics. But other practitioners and philosophers have been critical of this assumption. Some have held that what psychophysics really measures are functionally-characterized discriminative capacities. Others have taken the even more radical view that psychophysics does not really measure any inner variables, whether phenomenological or neural.
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Notes
- 1.
Many of the considerations of examples from psychophysics that are discussed here first came to my attention while I was a visiting scholar at the Center for Adaptive Systems at Boston University in 1993. I would also like to thank Anthony Jack for helpful comments on an earlier version of this article, and for directing me to Donald Laming’s books.
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Horst, S. (2010). The Role of Phenomenology in Psychophysics. In: Schmicking, D., Gallagher, S. (eds) Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2646-0_24
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