S.S. STEVENS’ LEGACY: AN IDEAL PSYCHOPHYSICAL LAW?

Authors

  • Lawrence M. Ward

Abstract

S.S. Stevens left a legacy that still resonates today, although there are some who feel that we should depart from the program he and Fechner before him pursued, and others who have refined that program considerably. In this paper I reiterate some of that legacy, in Stevens’ terms, and speculate about how we can create an ideal psychophysical law, similar in derivation and usefulness to the ideal laws of physics, with the ideal gas law as a physical example. I also develop a few of the implications of this ideal law for the apparently diverging traditions of biological and physical approaches to psychophysics.

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