Fechner, Gustav Theodor
Fechner, Gustav Theodor
Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1878) is considered to be the founder of psychophysics and thus of experimental psychology as a whole. He was also the founder of experimental aesthetics. Fechner was born in Lower Lusatia, then part of German northern Silesia. His father and both of his grandfathers were clergymen. Fechner studied medicine first at the University of Dresden and then at the University of Leipzig, obtaining his degree in 1822. His interests turned more and more to physics, however, and he was appointed instructor of natural philosophy at Leipzig the following year. During his years as a student, the lectures of Lorenz Oken on natural philosophy and of E. H. Weber on physiology made the most lasting impressions on Fechner. Oken is now forgotten, but he was then a renowned romantic natural philosopher and cured Fechner of his “man, the machine” approach. Fechner hailed Weber, the discoverer of “Weber’s law,” as the real father of psychophysics. [See WEBER, ERNST HEINRICH.]
After his appointment to the university faculty, Fechner began experimental studies of physical and chemical problems and supported himself by translating, revising, and publishing reference works and textbooks on physics and chemistry. The sheer volume of the work he did during these years is extraordinary. In addition to 28 investigations of his own, published between 1827 and 1840, he annually turned out 1,500 to 2,000 printed pages of textbooks and reference works between 1822 and 1838. He even found time to write several literary pieces, which he published under the pseudonym of “Dr. Mises.”
Fechner was married in 1833, and in 1834 he was appointed professor of physics at Leipzig. But he occupied the chair only until 1839; after repeated attacks of severe exhaustion he was, for three years, completely incapacitated by a mysterious illness. The major symptoms were disturbances of vision, with hypersensitivity to bright light, sporadic total failure of digestion, obsessions, and, finally, more and more terrifying hallucinations. He recovered quite suddenly. It seems most likely that the illness was an atypical form of schizophrenia.
The initial impetus for the work on which Fechner’s fame is based doubtless came from Oken, who fascinated him so much that at first he was resolved to emulate Oken’s unrestrained philosophizing. However, Fechner’s empirical research in physics and physiology saved him, and in the guise of “Dr. Mises,” he himself participated in mocking this kind of romantic inventing of concepts, which appears to prove everything, while actually it proves nothing. Oken continued to exert some influence on Fechner, however, and later he returned to this kind of thinking without surrendering to it completely.
Psychophysics
The problem that concerned Fechner most was the connection between body and mind. His Ele-mente der Psychophysik(1860) aims at utilizing experimental procedures, such as those employed by Weber previously, to explore this connection more precisely, arriving, if possible, at mathematically formulated laws. Earlier, Johann Friedrich Herbart had demanded that psychological laws be formulated in mathematical terms, but he despaired of the likelihood that psychology would ever obtain the necessary experimental data. Fechner saw in Weber’s threshold experiments the possibility of securing such data. He assumed that the difference between two sensations may be defined by the number of “just noticeable differences” (jnd) between them, and that these jnd’s can be represented mathematically. He used the number of jnd’s above the lower absolute threshold as a measure of the intensity of sensation evoked by a stimulus. In order to be able to describe the relationship between psychic and physical quantities mathematically, Fechner sought to establish a general functional relationship between sensations and stimuli of whatever magnitude. In the range within which Weber’s law is valid–Weber’s law states that jnd’s are proportional to the magnitude of the stimuli–integration yields a function that describes the intensity of a sensation in terms of the logarithm of the stimuli, measured from the absolute threshold.
Since the acuity of the sensory apparatus fluctuates from instant to instant and from person to person, thresholds can be defined only statistically. Fechner perfected the experimental strategies that had earlier been used by Weber and by Vierordt, as well as by such astronomers and physicists as Lambert, Steinheil, and Laugier, to determine the degree of uncertainty or the accuracy of measurement in comparisons of stimuli. According to the nature of variation of the stimulus in comparisons of successive sensations, he distinguished three kinds of psychophysical methods of data collection: (1) the method of jnd’s, in which the difference between the stimuli compared is gradually increased until it is perceptible or diminished until it is no longer perceptible; this is also called the method of limits; (2) the method of right and wrong cases, in which a standard stimulus is compared with randomly varied comparison stimuli; this method is also called the constancy method; and (3) the method of average error, in which a comparison stimulus is adjusted by the subject to correspond to a standard; this is also referred to as the reproduction method.
In calculating threshold values, Fechner employed the law of errors formulated by Gauss and Laplace, and in his posthumous Kollektivmass-lehre(1897) he set forth the applicability of the law of errors to many other problems in psychology. The Kollektivmasslehre also contains his contributions to correlation statistics. It is the first textbook of statistics to be designed especially for behavioral scientists. Using carefully planned experiments, whose layouts resemble those today used in the analysis of variance, he endeavored to exclude from the calculation of reaction variability, which defines the threshold difference, those constant errors that arise from the particular features of the experimental procedure.
Fechner realized that “psychophysics” (his coinage) was an innovation of great importance: he called it a science “in the initial state of becoming,” and his own work for all its scope, merely “a modest beginning of a beginning.” His work was soon taken up by some of the greatest scientists of his time. As far back as 1858, Ernst Mach and Hermann von Helmholtz had begun to experiment on their own, stimulated by Fechner’s preliminary report. Wilhelm Wundt followed in 1862, A. W. Volkmann in 1864, H. Aubert and J. R. L. Delboeuf in 1865, and J. Bernstein and Vierordt in 1868. Of the outstanding specialists in the field of psychology only one remained a skeptic: William James, who as late as 1890 declared that despite all its acumen and all its care, the psychological yield of the Elemente was “just nothing,” not important enough to merit mention in even a footnote.
The methods of measurement developed by Fechner are now generally adopted in quantitative experimental psychology, although some of the mathematical implications of his derivations are open to serious criticism (Luce & Galanter 1963). They are employed with equal success in all sorts of fields and for the most diverse problems. In recent years, the problem of psychological scaling, which Fechner was the first to appreciate and deal with, has again come to the forefront; it has been remarkably clarified and given new depth, especially in the work of S. S. Stevens and G. Ekman (for example, Stevens 1934).
Fechner is remembered almost exclusively as a methodologist. The fundamental theoretical postulates he presented in his psychophysics have gone unnoticed and are generally attributed to later authors. Most noteworthy is his working hypothesis of “concrete parallelism,” which assumes an isomorphism between phenomena of consciousness and “psychophysical phenomena,” that is, those processes occurring in the cerebrum that are directly associated with the phenomena of consciousness. This assumption and its elaboration is usually attributed to Ewald Hering, Georg Elias Muller, Max Wertheimer, and, above all, Wolfgang Kohler, although it was clearly formulated in Volume 2 of Fechner’s Elemente.
Aesthetics
Following his work in psychophysics, Fechner ventured also to transform the field of aesthetics from speculation to exact factual research. He summarized the results of his efforts in his Vorschule der Aesthetik(1876). He tried to derive the conditions that determine what is pleasing and what is displeasing, not from a higher ideal of beauty but from below, by systematic empirical comparison of the beautiful with the less beautiful. This endeavor was not as successful as his work in psychophysics. Fechner was the victim of a then prevalent confusion: to him, as to his contemporaries, “from below” meant not only “from perception to concept,” but also “from the simple to the more complex,” and the properties of the complex, it was then believed, are those of its simple constituents. The study by Christian von Ehrenfels, who proved that this postulate is false— and thereby not only opened up a new era in psychology but also made possible a more relevant theory of beauty—did not appear until three years after Fechner’s death.
Fechner did, however, conduct a study—in line with his attempt to establish an experimental science of aesthetics—which makes him one of the earliest forerunners of modern opinion research. Two nearly identical versions of a Madonna reputed to have been painted by Hans Holbein were then being exhibited in Dresden, and Fechner asked the visitors to the exhibition to note on a sheet of paper which of the two they thought was more beautiful. At that time the public was unfortunately not accustomed to such questionnaires, and only 116 of the 11,000 visitors took the trouble to write their comments. Of these 116, some were art critics who had previously formed judgments, while others failed to follow instructions, thus rendering the results useless. Nonetheless, the experiment made a contribution to methodology that might have become as influential as psychophysics, had its significance been understood.
Analysis of systems
Around 1850, Fechner tackled another fundamental problem, that of the apparent finality of particular processes in animate and inanimate nature. In contrast to the neovitalists, he insisted that this finality be explained within the framework of the principle of causality. He laid down the axiom that every system in nature that is delimited with respect to its environment and hence is more or less closed, as well as every relatively autonomous part of such a system, tends, after a longer or shorter period of dislocation, to return to its previous state, and he specifically speaks of a “tendency toward stability.” From this there is a direct road, via Ernst Mach’s observation that the stable states of comparatively closed structures are formally distinct, to the concepts of equilibrium of Wolfgang Kohler and Ludwig von Bertalanffy. As Fechner used the concept of “stability,” it was broader than it is today; it included not only what he called “simple stability” but also “complex stability,” examples of which he found primarily in organisms. These examples are identical with Kohler’s “stationary states” and Berta-lanffy’s “steady states.” Thus, Fechner’s works contain a surprising number of stimulating ideas which are still influential, though they may sometimes appear under different names [see PERSONALITY: CONTEMPORARY VIEWPOINTS; SYSTEMS ANALYSIS, article on PSYCHOLOGICAL SYSTEMS].
Wolfgang Metzger
[For the historical context of Fechner’s work, see the biographies ofGAUSS; LAPLACE; WEBER, E. H. For discussion of the subsequent development of his ideas, seeAESTHETICS; PSYCHOPHYSICS; QUANTAL RESPONSE; SCALING; and the biographies ofHELMHOLTZ; THURSTONE; WUNDT.]
WORKS BY FECHNER
(1836) 1943 Life After Death. Pages 21-90 in Gustav Theodor Fechner, Life After Death. New York: Pantheon. ? First published as Das Büchlein vom Leben nach dem Tode.
1848 Ueber das Lustprinzip des Handelns. Zeitschriftfür Philosophie und philosophische Kritik New Series 19: 1-30, 163–194.
(1860) 1907 Elemente der Psychophysik.2 vols. 3d ed. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel.
1871 Ueber die Aechtheitsfrage der holbeirischen Madonna: Discussion und Acten. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel.
1873 Einige Ideen zur Schöpfungsund Entwickelungsgeschichte der Organismen. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel.
1874 Ueber den Ausgangswerth der kleinsten Abweichungssumme, dessen Bestimmung, Verwendung und Verallgemeinerung. K. Sôchsische Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, Mathematisch-physische Klasse, Abhandlungen, 11, no. 1. Leipzig: Hirzel.
(1876) 1897-1898 Vorschule der Aesthetik.2d ed. 2 vols. in 1. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel.
1877 In Sachen der Psychophysik. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel.
1882 Revision der Hauptpuncte der Psychophysik. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel.
1888 Ueber die psychischen Massprincipien und das weber’sche Gesetz: Discussion mit Elsas und Köhler. Philosophische Studien4 : 161–230.
Kollektivmasslehre. Edited by G. F. Lipps. Leipzig: Engel-mann, 1897.
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Boring, Edwin G. (1929) 1950 A History of Experimental Psychology.2d ed. New York: Appleton. ? See especially pages 275–296.
Boring, Edwin G. 1942 Sensation and Perception in the History of Experimental Psychology. New York: Appleton.
Brett, George S. 1921 A History of Psychology. Volume 3: Modern Psychology. London: Allen & Unwin. ? See especially pages 127–239.
BURT, C. 1960 Gustav Theodor Fechner: Elemente der Psychophysik,1860-1960. British Journal of Statistical Psychology13 : 1–10.
HALL, G. STANLEY 1912 Founders of Modern Psychology. New York: Appleton. ? See especially pages 123-177, “Gustav Theodor Fechner.”
KÜLPE, O. 1901 Zu Gustav Theodor Fechners Gedächtnis. Vierteljahresschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie und Soziologie25 : 191–217.
Lasswitz, Kurd (1896)1910 Gustav Theodor Fechner.3d ed. Stuttgart (Germany): Frommann.
LUCE, R. DUNCAN; and GALANTER, EUGENE 1963 Psy-chophysical Scaling. Volume 1, pages 245-308 in R. Duncan Luce, Robert R. Bush, and Eugene Galan-ter (editors), Handbook of Mathematical Psychology. New York: Wiley.
Michels, Walter C.; and KELSON, HARRY 1954 A Reconciliation of the Veg Scale With Fechner’s Law. American Journal of Psychology67 : 677–683.
STEVENS, S. S. 1934 The Volume and Intensity of Tones. American Journal of Psychology46 : 397–408.
THURSTONE, L. L. 1929 Fechner’s Law and the Method of Equal-appearing Intervals. Journal of Experimental Psychology12 : 214–224.
Wirth, Wilhelm 1912 Psychophysik: Darstellung der Methoden der experimentellen Psychologie. Leipzig: Hirzel.
Wundt, Wilhelm 1901 Gustav Theodor Fechner: Rede zur Feier seines hundertjährigen Geburtstages. Leipzig: Engelmann.