Gustav Fechner

Gustav Fechner (born April 19, 1801, Gross Särchen, near Muskau, Lusatia [Germany]—died November 18, 1887, Leipzig, Germany) was a German physicist and philosopher who was a key figure in the founding of psychophysics, the science concerned with quantitative relations between sensations and the stimuli producing them.

Although he was educated in biological science, Fechner turned to mathematics and physics. In 1834 he was appointed professor of physics at the University of Leipzig. His health broke down several years later; his partial blindness and painful sensitivity to light in all likelihood developed as a result of his gazing at the Sun during the study of visual afterimages (1839–40).

Pensioned modestly by the university in 1844, he began delving more deeply into philosophy and conceived of a highly animistic universe with God as its soul. He discussed his idea of a universal consciousness at length in a work containing his plan of psychophysics, Zend-Avesta: oder über die Dinge des Himmels und des Jenseits (1851; Zend-Avesta: On the Things of Heaven and the Hereafter).

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Philosophy 101

Fechner’s Elemente der Psychophysik, 2 vol. (1860; Elements of Psychophysics), established his lasting importance in psychology. In this work he postulated that mind and body, though appearing to be separate entities, are actually different sides of one reality. He also developed experimental procedures, still useful in experimental psychology, for measuring sensations in relation to the physical magnitude of stimuli. Most important, he devised an equation to express the theory of the just-noticeable difference, advanced earlier by Ernst Heinrich Weber. This theory concerns the sensory ability to discriminate when two stimuli (e.g., two weights) are just noticeably different from each other. Later research has shown, however, that Fechner’s equation is applicable within the midrange of stimulus intensity and then holds only approximately true.

From about 1865 he delved into experimental aesthetics and sought to determine by actual measurements which shapes and dimensions are most aesthetically pleasing.