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La tesi potrebbe essere vista come una protoversione della teoria della
intenzionalità concettualizzata da Franz Brentano. Intentionalità:
Differenza tra
Il sé e il mondo / pensiero (Gedachten) e realtà
(Wirklichkeit)
Soggetto e oggetto
Contro una identità tra soggetto e oggetto supposta dai filosofi (come in
Leibniz) Helmholtz propendeva per una soluzione empirica: la congruenza
tra mente e materia era basata sulla esperienza.
Il soggetto helmholtziano, sebbene definito in terminni psicologici, era
sempre visto secondo canoni fisiologici, materialistici, oggettivi = secondo
le leggi delle scienze della natura.
Di qui la distinzione tra:
Scienze nomologiche (Aristotele) riferite a leggi =
1. approccio nomotetico: studio statitistico per trarre conclusioni
universali;
2. approccio idiografico con l’enfasi sulla esperienza soggettiva
dell’individuo.
Soul and matter were the two sides of the same coin
However, after emphasizing a common identity between corporal and
mental, he conceived a gradual differentiation of the subjective and the
objective that implied inner and outer viewpoints for all systems of nature.
As he wrote: “Corporal and spiritual, or body and soul, or material and
ideal, or physical and psychical […] are not different in ultimate basis and
essence but only according to the standpoint of conception [Auffassung] or
observation” (Fechner, 1851, Vol. 2, p. 321).
Experiments with contrast phenomena and chromatic perception = the
existence of colors, which he defined as “subjective” in line with Goethe
and Helmholtz but against the common physiological opinions (Hering,
Osann), since they were not related to the physical characteristics of the
inductive source of light (stimulus) (Fechner, 1838, 1840).
To explain this subjective characterization of colors, he elaborated an
arithmetical rule that could guarantee a quantification of the apparent
color composition: In the presence of two contemporaneous, colored
stimuli, the resulting intensification of impressions altered the relationship
between the physical intensity of either stimulus and the intensity of the
evoked sensations.
The formula, which showed how subjective could evolve into objective,
concerned the general and constant relationship of functional dependence
by which the quantitative analysis was being introduced into the study of
psychic dynamics.
Rotating color disc
The basis of Fechner’s golden formula
(measument formula):
1. different individuals have different
sensitivity to certain stimuli;
2. human sensitivity to stimuli changes
depends on which sense is affected;
3. The relationship between stimulus and
perception is logarithmic. This means
that if a stimulus varies as a geometric
progression (i.e., multiplied by a fixed
factor), the corresponding perception
is altered in an arithmetic
progression (i.e., in additive constant
amounts).
In 1858, he declared the end of “each speculation on the possibility
and impossibility of measuring the mind” (Fechner, 1858, p. 1).
Since he could not proceed to a direct measurement of psychic
conditions, which were only introspectively accessible, Fechner took
recourse to the indirect psychic measurement, based on the
measurement of material processes related to the psychic events
under investigation, which in turn were subdivided into equal parts,
i.e., into equivalent increments to obtain a unit of measurement.
Since it was difficult to obtain this directly, the increments of the
intensity of psychic conditions were determined using the living force
variations in the physical processes inducing them.
While these variations formed a series of values in arithmetic
progression, the first variations followed a geometric progression: It
dealt with the psychophysical law already assumed by Ernst H. Weber
(1846).
Redefining Weber’s “method of the smallest perceptible differences”
– already used in 1700 by J. Sauveur – as a “method of limits,” that is, the
basic unit of measurement, Fechner established the constant functional
relation between physical stimuli and intensity of sensations, where the
intensity of a sensation increased according to the logarithm of the
stimulus (Fechner, 1860, Vol. 2, p. 42).
For the first time in the history of psychology, psychic data had become a
quantity to be observed and mathematically measured, albeit indirectly.
The golden formula was born. It was explained in the Elemente der
Psychophysik [Elements of Psychophysics] (1860), which can be considered
the manifesto of the emerging scientific psychology and where both the
soul and the physical world were dealt with by two specific branches of
psychophysics: an “outer” one, aiming to analyze sensations through
external stimuli and therefore methodologically based on physics, and an
“inner” one, targeted at investigating the dependence of psychic conditions
on nervous processes.