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Toward a Resolution of the Fechner-Thurstone Legacy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

S. S. Stevens
S. S. Stevens*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

The occasion of a symposium to honor Fechner on the centennial of the publication of his Elemente der Psychophysik (1] has provided an excuse to review the Fechnerian legacy and to ask what perversity in the nature of science or the Zeitgeist has made it possible for Fechner’s concept of error to persist for a hundred years and grow famous. The central feature of this legacy is the notion that the jnd (just noticeable difference) can serve as a unit for the measurement of sensation. Since the jnd is really a measure of the uncertainty, dispersion, or variability among a set of judgments, this proposition makes residual “noise” the yardstick of sensory magnitude–a notion as curious as it seems improbable. Why did this conception survive its inventor, and why did it become, under Thurstone's expert guidance, the foundation of psychological measurement applied to subjective values and attitudes? Thurstone’s Case V in which he assumes equal discriminal dispersions (equal subjective variabilities) matches in effect the Fechnerian assumption that all jnds are subjectively equal.

Type
Original Paper
Information
Psychometrika , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , March 1961 , pp. 35 - 47
Copyright
Copyright © 1961 The Psychometric Society

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