Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

My own viewpoint on mental measurement (1887)

My own viewpoint on mental measurement (1887) The paper presents a translation of excerpts from Fechner's (1887) paper “On the principles of mental measurement and on Weber's law”, which was his last and “most perfect” (Wundt) statement of the assumptions underlying his outer psychophysics. Fechner maintains that all measurement, including mental measurement, rests on the principle that n magnitudes that are judged equal may be added and result in a magnitude n times as large as the individual magnitudes. He concedes that bisection methods fulfill this principle as well as just noticeable differences. Weber's law is not a necessary precondition of mental measurement; its validity is an empirical question rather than a matter of principle. The differential threshold is not an inherent property of sensation or attention, but depends on the unavoidable spatio-temporal noncoincidence of stimuli and of the sensations corresponding to them. Given this presupposition and assigning a value of zero to the absolute threshold, it is possible to arrive at a scale of sensation differences, and thus of sensations, from a scale of difference sensations. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Psychological Research Springer Journals

My own viewpoint on mental measurement (1887)

Psychological Research , Volume 49 (4) – Aug 24, 2004

Loading next page...
 
/lp/springer-journals/my-own-viewpoint-on-mental-measurement-1887-AduLwwgVNV

References (2)

Publisher
Springer Journals
Copyright
Copyright © 1987 by Springer-Verlag
Subject
Psychology; Psychology Research
ISSN
0340-0727
eISSN
1430-2772
DOI
10.1007/BF00309029
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

The paper presents a translation of excerpts from Fechner's (1887) paper “On the principles of mental measurement and on Weber's law”, which was his last and “most perfect” (Wundt) statement of the assumptions underlying his outer psychophysics. Fechner maintains that all measurement, including mental measurement, rests on the principle that n magnitudes that are judged equal may be added and result in a magnitude n times as large as the individual magnitudes. He concedes that bisection methods fulfill this principle as well as just noticeable differences. Weber's law is not a necessary precondition of mental measurement; its validity is an empirical question rather than a matter of principle. The differential threshold is not an inherent property of sensation or attention, but depends on the unavoidable spatio-temporal noncoincidence of stimuli and of the sensations corresponding to them. Given this presupposition and assigning a value of zero to the absolute threshold, it is possible to arrive at a scale of sensation differences, and thus of sensations, from a scale of difference sensations.

Journal

Psychological ResearchSpringer Journals

Published: Aug 24, 2004

There are no references for this article.