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The Invention of Physical Science pp 147–173Cite as

From Psychophysics to Phenomenalism: Mach and Hering on Color Vision

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Part of the book series: Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science ((BSPS,volume 139))

Abstract

At the end of his famous 1672 paper in which he presented his new theory of light and colors, Isaac Newton admitted: “But to determine more absolutely, what light is, ... and by what modes or actions it produceth in our minds the phantasms of colours, is not so easie. And I shall not mingle conjectures with certainties.”1 Although Newton later in the Optics would occasionally “mingle conjectures” about how the human eye “sees” color, his theory was primarily a theory of light, a physical theory with light rays, prisms, angles of refraction, lenses and barycentric diagrams as its chief working objects. Not until the nineteenth century did color become a fully subjective phenomenon, an aspect of nature impossible to consider apart from human verbal reports about visual experience. This shift in the conceptual and disciplinary location of color, from the physical to the physiological and psychological, began perhaps with Johann von Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre (1810) but it became canonical only with the appearance of the second section of Hermann von Helmholtz’s Handbuch der physiologischen Optik (1860). Yet even after 1860, sorting out the relative roles for physical, physiological and psychological language in describing color experiences and in explaining such experiences remained exceedingly controversial.

To Erwin N. Hiebert, in grateful appreciation for introducing me to Ernst Mach in a Harvard seminar on “Scientists as Philosophers.”

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Notes

  1. Isaac Newton: (1672), ‘New Theory about Light and Colours,’ reprinted in I. Bernard Cohen, ed., Isaac Newton’s Papers & Letters on Natural Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 57.

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  18. Hering was criticizing Helmholtz’s explanation of the phenomena of simultaneous contrast in psychological terms of “unconscious judgments” and “habits.” See Kremer, ‘Innovation’ (ref. 4), pp. 50–55. This would not be the last time Helmholtz would be linked to spiritism. See Wayne H. Stromberg, ‘Helmholtz and Zoellner: Nineteenth- century Empiricism, Spiritism, and the Theory of Space Perception,’ Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 25 (1989), 371–83.

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  21. Ibid., XXXVIII, 200.

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  22. Ibid., XXXIX, 244.

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  23. Ibid., XL, 85–97.

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  26. Ibid., XLI, 184–89.

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  27. Ibid., XLI, 190–213.

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  28. Helmholtz, Handbuch (ref. 10), p. 272; Gustav Theodor Fechner: (1860), Elemente der Psychophysik, 2 vols. 3d unchanged ed. (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hartel, 1907), 2: 274.

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  32. Erwin N. Hiebert, The Genesis of Mach’s Early Views on Atomism,’ in Robert S. Cohen and Raymond J. Seeger, eds., Ernst Mach: Physicist and Philosopher (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1970), pp. 79–106

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  33. Wolfram W. Swoboda, ‘Physics, Physiology and Psychophysics: The Origins of Ernst Mach’s Empiriocriticism,’ Rivista difilosofia 73 (1982), 234–74.

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  35. See Johann Friedrich Herbart, Lehrbuch der Psychologie [1816, 2d ed. 1834], reprinted in idem, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Karl Kehrbach and Otto Flugel, 19 vols. (Langensalza: Beyer, 1887–1912), 4: 295–436, and idem, Psychologie als Wissenschaft neu gegründet auf Erfahrung, Metaphysik und Mathematik, 2 vols. [1824–25], reprinted in Werke 5: 177–434, 6: 1–338. For the intellectual and pedagogical heritage of Herbart’s psychology, which I here ignore, see Harold B. Dunkel, Herbart and Herbartianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); David E. Leary, ‘The Philosophical Development of the Conceptions of Psychology in Germany, 1750–1850,’ Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences 14 (1978), 113–21; idem, ‘The Historical Foundation of Herbart’s Mathematization of Psychology,’ Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 16 (1980), 150–63; Gary Hatfield, The Natural and the Normative: Theories of Spatial Perception from Kant to Helmholtz (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1990), pp. 117–28.

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  37. Herbart, Werke (ref. 26), 4: 364, 371–2.

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  38. For example, for the static case of two fully opposed presentations a and b, the total amount of mutual inhibition equals the weaker presentation b, and (a + b)/b =b/(b 2(a + b)), and the remaining non-inhibited amount of a = a − b 2/(a + b). For a case of movement, Herbart’s simplest law is s = S(1 - e -t), where S is the total amount of mutual inhibition, t the elapsed time since the interaction began, and s the supressed portion of the total sum over t. If a completely inhibited presentation n is being raised above the threshold of consciousness with the help a new presentation P, and if p is the remainder of II not inhibited, and r the remainder of P not inhibited, then (rp/II) [(p -ѡ/p] dt = dѡ, where ѡ is that portion of p already brought into consciousness. Herbart, Werke (ref. 26), 5: 288, 339, 368–69.

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  39. Herbart, Werke (ref. 20), 5: 299–300,415–16; 6: 192. Such a three-dimensional graphic representation of all possible color hues and saturations had been long discussed by artists and natural philosophers. See Paul D. Sherman, Colour Vision in the Nineteenth Century (Bristol: Adam Hilger Ltd, 1981), pp. 60–80.

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  40. Ernst Mach, ‘Vortäge über Psychophysik,’ Oesterreichische Zeitschrift für praktische Heilkunde 9 (1863), cols. 146–8, 167–70, 202–4, 225–8, 242–5, 260–1, 277–9, 294–8, 316–8, 335–8, 352–4, 362–6, at cols. 169–70, 363, 365–6; cf. Hiebert, ‘Atomism’ (ref. 24), p. 99.

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  42. Hermann L. F. Helmholtz: (1887), On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, transl. from the 4th German ed. by Alexander J. Ellis (New York: Dover, 1954), pp. 49–65.

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  43. Ernst Mach, ‘Zur Theorie des Gehörorgans,’ Sitzungsberichte der mathematisch-natur-wissenschaftlichen Classe der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 48/2 (1863), 283–300, at 297 (hereafter SW). See Swoboda, ‘Physics, Physiology and Psychophysics’ (ref. 24), pp. 245–47.

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  44. Ernst Mach, ‘Untersuchungen über den Zeitsinn des Ohres,’ SW 51/2 (1865), 133–50.

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  45. Ernst Mach, ‘Bemerkungen über intermittirende Lichtreize,’ Archiv für Anatomie, Physiologie und wissenschaftlichte Medicin (1865), 629–35. For an overview of previous research on the persistence of afterimages, see Helmholtz, Handbuch (ref. 10), pp. 336–56.

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  49. Ernst Mach: (1865), ‘On the Effect of the Spatial Distribution of the Light Stimulus on the Retina,’ transl. in Floyd Ratliff, Mach Bands: Quantitative Studies on Neural Networks in the Retina (San Francisco: Holden-Day, Inc., 1965), pp. 253–71. Similar phenomena had been noticed at least once before, without attracting any further discussion. See James Jurin, ‘An Essay upon Distinct and Indistinct Vision,’ in Robert Smith, A Compleat System of Opticks, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Printed for the Author, 1738), 2: 115–71, at 168 and Plate 20, Figure 68.

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  50. By adding the second derivative of the intensity of the stimulus as a function of lateral position across the retina, Mach rendered Fechner’s law as e = a log [i/b ± k (d2 i/dx2)2/i], thereby making the intensity of sensation (e) a function not only of the intensity of stimulus (i) but also of the rate of curvature of that intensity. See Mach, ‘Spatial Distribution’ (ref. 40), pp. 262–64.

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  51. Mach, ‘Spatial Distribution’ (ref. 40), p. 269.

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  52. Ernst Mach: (1868), ‘On the Physiological Effect of Spatially Distributed Light Stimuli’, transl. in Ratliff, Mach Bands (ref. 40), pp. 299–306, at 306.

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  54. Ernst Mach: (1868), ‘On the Dependence of Retinal Points on One Another,’ transl. in Ratliff, Mach Bands (ref. 40), pp. 307–20, at 316–17.

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  55. Ernst Mach: (1860), ‘Über die Änderung des Tones und der Farbe durch Bewegung,’ reprinted in Annalen der Physik und Chemie 112 (1861), 58–76; 116 (1862), 333–38. In the second article, however, Mach agreed with a critic that stellar speeds are too slow for any Doppler shifts in color to be detected. See Swoboda, ‘Physics, Physiology and Psychophysics’ (ref. 24), pp. 236–39.

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  56. Fechner, Psychophysik (ref. 21), 2: 265–308.

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  57. See Kremer, ‘Innovation’ (ref. 4), pp. 20–2.

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  58. Fechner, Psychophysik (ref. 21), 2: 285–8, supported this hypothesis by referring to recent anatomical studies of the cholea and the Corti fibers, and noting that Helmholtz in 1859 had extolled its virtues.

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  60. Ibid., 2: 555–60.

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  62. Fechner, Psychophysik (ref. 21), 2: 252, 276, discussed Helmholtz’s refutation of Brewster, which makes it all the more interesting that the young Mach mistook Brewster for Young.

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  63. Mach, ‘Vorträge’ (ref. 31), cols. 295–8, 316–8, 335–6.

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  64. Fechner nowhere had restricted the basic color sensations to three, and indeed as noted above had explicitly rejected this feature of Young’s theory.

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  65. Mach, ‘Lichtreize’ (ref. 36), p. 631. Helmholtz, Handbuch (ref. 10), p. 281, also had described black as a “real sensation” and not as the “lack of all sensation.”

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  66. Mach, ‘Lichtreize’ (ref. 36), pp. 633–5. “Auch zur Young’schen Farbentheorie stehen einige der angeführten Bemerkungen in Beziehung,” began Mach (p. 633). The “remarks” in question might refer to the outermost nerve elements, cited above at n. 39. Yet Mach’s comment about interacting, mutually inhibiting nerve elements would not provide the basis for his rejection of Young’s theory.

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  67. Adolf Fick, Lehrbuch der Anatomie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane (Lahr: Schauenburg, 1864), pp. 291–4. Fick named red, green and blue as the fundamental sen- sations, and unlike Helmholtz gave the red curve a double peak in his graph of the response curves for the three receptors. Despite this modification, Fick’s textbook strongly supported the remaining elements of Young’s theory as elaborated by Helmholtz.

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  68. Mach, ‘Spatial Distribution’ (ref. 40), pp. 269–70.

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  69. Mach, ‘Lichtreize’ (ref. 36), p. 634, did note that contrast effects can make visible complementary components of a sensation of white; but that fact did not allow the white to be folded into the four simple color sensations.

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  73. For several scattered counter-examples, see Kremer, ‘Innovation’ (ref. 4), pp. 20–2, 43–4.

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  75. Hermann Aubert, Physiologie der Netzhaut (Breslau: Morgenstern, 1861), p. 186.

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  76. See Robert S. Cohen, ‘Ernst Mach: Physics, Perception and the Philosophy of Science,’ in Cohen and Seeger, eds., Mach (ref. 24), pp. 126–64.

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  77. Ernst Mach: (1933), The Science of Mechanics, transl. from the 9th German ed. by Thomas J. McCormack (LaSalle, I11.: Open Court, 1960), pp. 1–9.

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  78. See Hering, Lichtsinne (ref. 2), XXXVIII, 196, 200; XLI, 186, 201, 203; XLII, 198. Hering rarely cited other sources in his monograph; among authors he did cite, Mach appeared about as frequently as anyone, along with Helmholtz, Fechner and Aubert.

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  79. Hering, Lichtsinne (ref. 2), XLI, 186, 201; XLII, 198.

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  1. Department of History, Dartmouth College, USA

    Richard L. Kremer

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  1. University of Oklahoma, Norman, USA

    Mary Jo Nye

  2. Brown University, Providence, R.I., USA

    Joan L. Richards

  3. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA

    Roger H. Stuewer

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Kremer, R.L. (1992). From Psychophysics to Phenomenalism: Mach and Hering on Color Vision. In: Nye, M.J., Richards, J.L., Stuewer, R.H. (eds) The Invention of Physical Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 139. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-2488-1_7

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