Are the intensity differences of sensation quantitative III / by Henry J. Watt.

  • Watt, Henry J. (Henry Jackson), 1879-1925.
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Are the intensity differences of sensation quantitative III / by Henry J. Watt. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    same time be directly immeasurable and indirectly measurable, as Meinong^ declares and as Professor Dawes Hicks ^ agrees. Such a proposition can have an appearance of plausibility only by the sub- stitution of a new m.easurable object for the one that is directly immeasurable. This substitution may be occasioned by the close connexion of the two objects in the world of reality, but it is none the less a substitution. To speak of a surrogative form of measurement is both misleading and wrong. What the medical thermometer measures is not the patient’s sensations of warmth or cold or how warm or cold he feels. In this particular instance the departure from any sort of regular correlation between magnitude of felt warmth and degree of temperature is notorious. Whafc the physician is usually concerned to know is the temperature of his patient’s body. And that is as little a surrogative measurement of his patient’s feelings as the sight or taste of the physic he offers is a surrogative cure for his patient’s felt discom- fort, however much or little the material physic may be suited to restore the patient’s body to its normal condition, No one sets out to measure the sensed distances evoked by a thermometer scale, but only the lines or lengths of that scale, The latter are measurable, as are any multiple objects, in so far as they produce regular changes upon lines or lengths. In all cases it is only that aspect of the motion of matter which by an obvious convenieijce has come to be called temperature that is measur- able. And similarly in other such examples, I would also submit that in every case in which the treatment of single states of mind as multitudes is in any way made to be plausible, we find a substitution of objects of the kind mentioned. So for example in Fechner’s formula, which is perfectly valid in so far as S in the expression S = K Log I means ‘ the numerical value of S,’ if it exists. But unfortunately this value has no real object; the object and the value are purely imaginary. The fault here does not lie in the applica- tion of mathematical symbols and processes to the data of sense; for these are most certainly applicable to the data of sense whenever we have an opportunity of dealing with multitudes of these data, e.g. in the statistical manipulation of records of the frequency of visual and other images, in the study of memory and so on. The error committed by Fechner consists in applying mathematical symbols and processes to the data of sense without any proper psychological or objective justification. ^ Ztschr.f. Psychol., 1896, xt. 239. 2 Cf. pp. 168 ff.