Psychophysics

I had never heard the term psychophysics until a minute ago! It's about the objective  perception of physical effects. The idea is that, although perception is inherently subjective, one can measure the sensitivity of subjects to physical effects and form a notion of normal perception statistically. This is then objective in the sense that it gives expectations of any individual subject's ability to discriminate between different levels of some particular stimulus, such as the amplitude of a sound or vibration of a certain frequency. See Weber–Fechner law and Stevens' power law.

Both Weber's law and Fechner's law were formulated by Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887). They were first published in 1860 in the work Elemente der Psychophysik (Elements of Psychophysics). This publication was the first work ever in this field, and where Fechner coined the term psychophysics to describe the interdisciplinary study of how humans perceive physical magnitudes. He made the claim that "...psycho-physics is an exact doctrine of the relation of function or dependence between body and soul."

I read about it in Jeremy Gray's Henri Poincaré: a scientific biography.

For more on transitivity and equality relations see Eugenia Cheng's The Joy of Abstraction.

Poincaré on geometric space as a form of understanding, from his 1898 essay On the Foundations of Geometry.

See https://academic.oup.com/monist/article/9/1/1/2272426:



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