STEVENS, STANLEY SMITH

(b. Ogden, Utah, 4 November 1906; d. Vail, Colorado, 18 January 1973)

experimental psychology, psychophysics.

Stevens was the only child in a Mormon family. After mission service abroad, he took his B.A. at Stanford in 1931. He received his doctorate under Edwin Garrigues Boring at Harvard in 1933 for experimental work on audition. As a spokesperson for “operationism” in psychology, he helped spark the “unity of science” movement in 1935.

His book Hearing (1938) refined Hermann von Helmholtz’s place theory by incorporating the electrical response recording of E. G. Wever and C. W. Bray and the basilar membrane hypothesis of Georg von Békésy. By 1940, Stevens also had begun to replace indirect methods of defining sensation with direct scaling methods.

During World War II, Stevens was codirector of Harvard’s federally funded “defense research” project to design communications systems for military applications. His Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory trained a postwar generation of sensory psychologists. He edited the authoritative Handbook of Experimental Psychology (1951), featuring his own classic chapter on scales of measurement. In 1953, Stevens proposed the power law to describe the growth of sensation intensity with the increase of physical intensity. Ignoring age-old criticism that sensory experience cannot be quantified, he spent two decades determining the power exponents for more than two dozen sensory continua.

Stevens’ “new psychophysics” set off debates about psychological methods, data, and theory. Probabilistic choice and signal detection theory grew from radar detection and took over threshold measurement. Stevens’ theory of four scales of measurement was extended into an axiomatic derivation of fundamental measurement. His program of describing power laws on all sensory continua has been extended to support the “unity of the senses” in consequence of invariant features of the environment.

Ancestry, Childhood, and Education . Stevens was raised in a family of industrious English immigrants to Utah, Smith Stevens, as he was called, graduated from high school in 1924, the same year in which his mother, Adeline, died from a lingering heart ailment and his father, Steven, was killed in an automobile accident. After a short period in the family’s electrical business, he did a three-year stint (1924–1927) as a Mormon missionary in Belgium, Switzerland, and eastern France. Returning to study at the University of Utah, Stevens was introduced to behavioral psychology in a course that used J. B. Watson’s Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology. In the summers he worked for the Idaho Power Company. Transferring in his junior year (1929) to Stanford University, he turned toward medicine after a successful anatomy laboratory course. On 28 March 1930, Stevens and Maxine Leonard of Salt Lake City were married; she joined him for his last year at Stanford.

After postgraduate summer courses in statistics (with H. E. Garrett) and the history of psychology (with J. F. Dashiell) at the University of Southern California, Stevens enrolled at Harvard in the Graduate School of Education, and Maxine studied philosophy at Radcliffe. In his first year, 1931–1932, he took statistics (with T. Kelley), systematic psychology (with E. G. Boring), and physiology (with W. J. Crozier). He switched to psychology after one semester, and took the preliminary examinations for the doctorate in the spring of 1932, Having done well, Stevens was awarded a fellowship of $900. Under the supervision of Boring, director of the psychological laboratory, he performed research on audition for his doctorate in the department of philosophy and psychology in 1933.

Psychological research and theory drew from different “schools” in the 1920’s. Edward B. Titchener at Cornell had promoted “structural psychology”, which emphasized systematic experimentation on the senses. Boring, Titchener’s student, had sought an accommodation with behaviorism by redefining the “attributes” of sensation in terms of their physical dimensions. A former engineering student, Boring in turn encouraged his student Stevens toward “a physics of the living organism” (Boring to Stevens, 26 October 1935). Stevens and Edwin B. Newman produced sounds with an electronic oscillator that had recently been pioneered by Harvey Fletcher at Bell Laboratories. They instructed human subjects to adjust a given sound to half or some multiple of the original sound stimulus. Despite his apocryphal account of the discovery of magnitude estimation in the 1950’s, Stevens was using direct methods of adjustment, fractionation, bisection, and ratio production to generate direct sensory scales before 1940, in place of the customary Fechnerian indirect measurement by a “unit of variability” in sensory judgments.

At issue was the Weber-Fechner psychophysical law. Following Ernst Heinrich Weber, Gustav Theodor Fechner believed that the ratio of a just noticeable stimulus increment ΔR to a total stimulus R is a constant, or ΔR/R = k. Fechner then made the assumption that corresponding to this fraction was a constant incremental unit of sensation (ΔS = c). It follows from ΔS = c (ΔR/R) that S, sensation magnitude, grows as a logarithmic function of stimulus magnitude, or S = k log R. Another way of saying this is that sensation intensity increases arithmetically as stimulus intensity increases geometrically. In a fragment from the 1930’s, Stevens incisively summed up decades of empirical criticism of Fechner’s law: “In the two principal sense departments [vision and audition] it breaks down at the extremes, and in all departments the fact of the threshold interrupts its continuity. We can conclude, then, that the theoretical formulation has not been verified” (Stevens to Boring, 1932). Stevens also raised the question at this time whether Fechner’s law was an empirical or a theoretical formula. Since the law did not fit the data over their entire range, he concluded that it was only theoretical. His own goal became the formulation and measurement of an empirical law, one that did not require the summation of units of variability.

Operationism and Building a Scientific Career . Boring recognized his prize student’s facility with electronic equipment and public debating. He extended Stevens’ assistantship of $900 through the academic year 1933–1934. He well knew that Harvard needed first-rate experimental scientists to legitimate his own rhetoric of experimentalism. At that very time, Boring’s hopes for institutional legitimation of psychology had taken a propitious turn. Harvard’s president, Abbott Lowell, retired in 1933, to be succeeded by a chemist, James B. Conant. In 1934, Boring’s motion to separate the department of psychology from the department of philosophy was accepted by the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The new department had Gordon Allport in social and personality psychology, C. C. Pratt in aesthetics, and J. G. Beebe-Center in emotions. H. A. Murray directed a clinical psychology laboratory. A distinguished newcomer from Chicago, Karl S. Lashley, was housed in the biological laboratories. B. F. Skinner was sponsored as a junior fellow between 1933 and 1936 by biologists L. J. Henderson and W. J. Crozier. Stevens joined Boring on the third floor of Emerson Hall, undertaking a series of projects that promised to aid Boring’s institutional ambitions and to bring a scientific career to himself. His lack of interest in classroom teaching, however, spelled trouble for his professional advancement and the fate of the department.

The aim of Boring’s ambition was a physicalist positivism for psychology, and this he repeatedly conveyed to Stevens. With his Physical Dimensions of Consciousness (1933) in mind, Boring wrote to Stevens: “You are furnishing the justification of it and the propaganda for it. I am pleased and grateful. . .” (Boring’s comments on his “tonal density” manuscript, 1933). Combining Ernst Mach’s sensationism with Percy W. Bridgman’s operationism, Boring and Stevens considered “the discriminatory response” to be “a step towards the operational analysis of what we mean by experience” (Stevens to Boring, 12 December 1934). While Boring traced this physicalist definition historically to Ernst Mach and R. Avenarius, Stevens couched his “operations” in terms of contemporary logical positivism as (1) a language for the physical measurement (2) of behavioral responses (3) by means of public or intersubjective statements.

Skinner, influenced by Machian positivism, remained critical of Stevens’ dualistic acceptance of sensation, or consciousness. Yet there was considerable agreement between Stevens’ operational epistemology and Skinner’s behaviorist epistemology on all three characteristics of positivism given by Stevens. Stevens always emphasized the stimulus, and Skinner the response; but they shared a commitment to the operational description of independent and dependent variables.

Despite forays into philosophy of science, the bulk of Stevens’ work was empirical. Supported in the year 1934–1935 by a National Research Council fellowship, he apprenticed at the Harvard Medical School with Hallowell Davis, whose physiological competence and electrical recording apparatus complemented Stevens’ psychophysical approach. During the year 1935–1936, Stevens received financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation. He was an instructor in psychology at Harvard in the academic year 1936–1937, receiving $2,750 to teach four sections and the laboratory course for Psychology 1. In 1936 his son, Peter, was born and Maxine was hospitalized with postpartum depression, from which she never recovered. Stevens threw himself into work on his book on hearing. His son was raised by a Mormon family in the Boston suburbs, and Stevens became a frequent guest at their dinner table.

Meanwhile, Davis urged Stevens forward, helping him to obtain a grant from the American Otological Society to look up Georg von Békésy in Budapest. Békésy’s early work on the propagation of traveling waves by the basilar membrane in the cochlea earned him a Nobel Prize in 1961. In 1940, Stevens worked with John Volkmann to provide independent evidence for Békésy’s neural quantum hypothesis of sensory thresholds.

During the years 1938 to 1940 Stevens became interested in William H. Sheldon’s body-typing work in constitutional psychology. After satisfying himself that subjects could indeed estimate (on a seven-point scale) each of three dimensions of somatotypes from photographs, he devised a machine with which to compute correlation coefficients of seventeen measurements taken on three photographic views (front, side, back) of the nude male body. Their use of ratios of front, back, and side sections to height represented an improvement on the absolute measurements of Sheldon’s chief predecessor, Ernst Kretschmer of Leipzig.

Stevens had distanced himself from physicalism and operational definition by 1939. Under the influence of C. W. Morris’ pragmatic theory of signs, he endorsed a hypothetico-deductive method to confirm by experimental observation the results of our deductions. At the Fifth International Congress for the Unity of Science in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1939), Stevens treated numerals as signs related by syntactic rules to three kinds of numerosity: ordinal, intensive (“groups showing a just noticeable difference in numerousness”), and extensive (“by determining when one group appeared half as numerous as another”). He derived this classification of scales from N. R. Campbell (1938); he revised it for the Sixth International Congress for the Unity of Science in 1941 and published it in 1946 and 1951 as four scales: nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio. Ironically, Campbell served on the nineteen-member committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science that in 1940 reported on Stevens’ sone scale of loudness and concluded that fundamental measurement would not be possible in psychology “until a meaning can be given to the concept of addition as applied to a sensation.”

Stevens ignored “the quantity objection” to “the concept of addition as applied to sensation” by simply accepting the subject’s ability to “add” sensations. This faith in introspective, yet operational, measurement of subjective consciousness committed him to a dualism, although, like other positivists, he believed that his position was monistic. As Savage put it, he failed to distinguish the introspectionist interpretation of sensation as empirically real from the behaviorist interpretation of sensation as fictional. Stevens had a behaviorist’s conviction that methods could define formal concepts, and that consistent formal concepts define reality. He claimed to have taken the concept of in variance from the Harvard mathematician G. D. Birkhoff, who spoke on the topic at a meeting Stevens cohosted with Rudolf Carnap. The papers Stevens wrote in the early 1940’s were circulated among friends during the war and later attracted widespread acceptance in many disciplines.

The Harvard Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory . In 1940, two years after Stevens was appointed assistant professor of psychology, he undertook a project for the National Defense Research Council (NDRC) Committee on Sound Control to study the effects of noise on psychomotor efficiency. The Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory, under Stevens’ direction, continued to conduct auditory research under contract with the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) throughout World War II in conjunction with the Electro-Acoustic Laboratory, directed by Harvard acoustic scientist Leo L. Beranek. Amid the turbulence of wartime priorities, Stevens demonstrated skills and leadership in a new “big science” atmosphere. He directed a laboratory that had a staff of about fifty persons, among whom were some of the outstanding talents of that generation: the senior psychologists were John Volk-mann and Edwin B. Newman, who became the associate director; the administrative assistant was Geraldine Stone; Clifford T. Morgan, an instructor, was employed as liaison by the OSRD.

President Conant was not involved with the wartime Harvard NDRC-OSRD activities, and neither was Provost Paul Buck; the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory was responsible directly to the treasurer of Harvard College, William Claflin. External support brought new institutional and scientific priorities. The 1941–1946 contract research included measurement of noise levels and their effects, intercom equipment in noisy aircraft, the control of sound in combat vehicles, cushioned earphones, insulation to take high frequencies out of aircraft engine sounds, sound amplifiers for possible tactical weapons, radar jamming devices, and an anechoic chamber to study the location, direction, and interference properties of sound. Stevens directed contract research that culminated in a joint publication with Beranek’s Electro-Acoustic Laboratory, Principles of Sound Control in Airplanes.

Postwar Institutionalization of Psychology. Immediately after the war. Harvard psychologists foresaw the possible decline in their external funding. Stevens took the lead in counteracting this situation by writing two popular articles on his wartime research and its peacetime applications, “Machines Cannot Fight Alone” and “The Science of Noise,” in 1946. He encouraged his assistants to rewrite their bimonthly technical reports into scientific articles. By this academic-political strategy, they justified the peacetime value of sensory research. Students and their instructors came to appreciate “psychometric functions” for absolute and differential thresholds along a wide spectrum of sound and light stimuli (eight or nine logarithmic units). The extension of the range of sensory stimuli, which electronics had made possible, set the stage for Stevens’ revision of sensory scaling a few years later.

For his contributions to the department and the profession, Stevens was promoted to associate professor in 1944 and full professor in 1946. Gordon Allport objected, largely because of Stevens lack of interest in undergraduate instruction.

Meanwhile, the rift between the experimental psychologists and the sociologists had reached an impasse, which Buck resolved by creating a department of social relations. Stevens’ directorship of the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory earned him and Boring a consolation prize from the administration. The Memorial Hall basement was renovated into a laboratory, library, and offices. Boring, the only person left in psychology of higher rank than Stevens, became chairman, and Beebe-Center returned to teach. Stevens directed the psychology laboratory (1949–1962), and consistently opposed cooperative teaching arrangements with the social relations group. This made difficulties for Edwin Newman, who became associate director of the laboratory and department chairman, managing the budget and teaching duties until the 1960’s. Two postdoctoral researchers, J. C. R. Licklider and George A. Miller, were hired part-time. However, the department of psychology lost ground at the undergraduate level to social relations, which became one of the most popular areas of concentration on campus.

Stevens, who avoided teaching as much as possible, guided graduate student research as long as it interested him. His most effective teaching was in the laboratory or discussing a manuscript with a student or colleague. After the war, many of the postdoctoral researchers in psychoacoustics stayed on at Harvard in appointments in psychology. Stevens undertook a five-year editorial project, the Handbook of Experimental Psychology (1951). His eloquent introductory chapter, “Mathematics, Measurement, and Psychophysics,” gave further visibility to a psychology based on operations and invariant relationships.

In 1948 Stevens bought a farmhouse in Silver Lake, New Hampshire, and renovated it with weekend assistance from his laboratory “family.” He took up skiing and wrote on the dynamics of skis and skiing.

Stevens remained active in national scientific affairs after the war. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1946. He consulted in Washington for the Research and Development Board (1946–1957). He was honored by the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and was elected to the American Philosophical Society and the American Physiological Society. Stevens was a member of the Council of the Acoustical Society from 1946 to 1949. During the period 1949–1952 he was chairman of the National Research Council Division of Anthropology and Psychology. In 1960 he received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, and in 1972 he was the first recipient of the Rayleigh Gold Medal of the British Acoustical Society.

Promoting and Defending a Program of Research . In 1953 Stevens returned to the laboratory, overcoming a feeling of having “grown rusty from directing others.” He was motivated by disagreement with Wendell R. Garner, who had shown that intervals produced by equisection (dividing a sensation into x equal parts) differ from ratios produced by fractionation (adjusting a stimulus to appear a fraction x as strong as a standard stimulus). In contrast with Garner’s method, which constrained the subject by end points, Stevens simply allowed the subjects to assign numbers proportionate to the “subjective magnitude” of stimulus intensities. This yielded a linear relation of sensation to stimulus intensity on a log-log plot.

Soon Stevens announced “a new psychophysical law” (1957), which stated that sensation intensity increases with some expanding stimulus intensity. In other words, equal stimulus ratios produce equal sensation ratios. This law was the power function

Ψ=Kϕⁿ,

where Ψ is the sensation, ϕ is the stimulus, n is the exponent, and k is a constant. The exponent varied with the particular sensory modality, and also within a modality for different stimulus conditions, such as adaptation, inhibition, size, and duration of stimuli. This “new psychophysics” elicited controversy over method, data, and theory.

Critics questioned the validity of a method that required subjects simply to affix a number to a stimulus. They called for “convergent operations.” Stevens answered by distinguishing between two kinds of sensory continua: prothetic continua, which measure “how much” (loudness, duration, apparent length, numerousness, and sensory intensity in general), and metathetic continua, which measure “what kind” (pitch, visual inclination, proportion, and sensory quality in general). Moreover, Stevens distinguished three kinds of scales—discriminability (poikilitic), category, and magnitude—that are linearly related on metathetic continua and nonlinearly related on prothetic continua.

Meanwhile, Joseph C. Stevens (no relation) performed direct matches between loudness and brightness in his dissertation under Stanley Stevens in 1957. Using Joseph Stevens’ data, Stanley Stevens published “cross-modality matches” of seven prothetic continua to force of handgrip in 1959. In this work his prediction that the resulting exponents were a product of two separate modality exponents was borne out empirically.

In 1962 Stevens became professor of psycho-physics and renamed his laboratory the Laboratory of Psychophysics. On 11 April 1963, he and Geraldine Stone, his administrative assistant, were married. (His first wife, Maxine, had died in October 1956.) Colleagues esteemed Geraldine (known as Didi) for the personal role she had played in the psychology department since 1940.

Reception and Further Developments , Progress in theory and experimental methods in psychophysics has continued to add to our knowledge of the sensory processes. Mathematical psychologists such as Clyde Coombs and David Krantz have axiomatized Steven’s psychophysical theories. Norman Anderson argues that the premise of functional measurement theory is that subjects do not scale sensation linearly; judgments of intensity and similarity undergo linear transformations. Hence scales must be examined simultaneously and rules for concatenating them devised. In particular, according to Lawrence Marks, ratio-scaling procedures must be distinguished from interval-scaling procedures, since they usually yield different scales of sensation. Going beyond Steven’s exclusive adherence to psychophysical relations between psychological and physical quantities, today’s “new psychophysics” accepts psychosensory relations between psychological attributes of sensation, as well as sensory-physical relations among physical dimensions alone. In a sense the search for the “unity of science” has thereby taken on the new goal of “unity of the senses”.

Many alternatives to psychophysical scaling have grown out of critiques of Stevens’ program. Signal detection methods brought probabilistic choice theory in the 1960’s (see the writings of C. H. Graham, R. D. Luce, B. S. Rosner, F. Attneave, and Patrick Suppes). The nature of sensation also became a theoretical issue. Roger N. Shepard maintained that what Stevens had really shown was that equal ratios of physical magnitude are psychologically equivalent. David H. Krantz, in turn, proposed that in magnitude estimation the subject’s judgments are mediated not by absolute values of sensations but by perceived relations between sensations. Behavioral psychologists such as G. E. Zuriff and William C. Stebbins have introduced the theoretical framework of “stimulus control” to deal with the issue of the subjectivity of sensation.

Despite the theoretical controversy surrounding Stevens’ power law and magnitude estimation technique, his scaling methods have been fruitfully applied in sociology, criminology, and political science. Ratio scales of various nonmetric stimuli have demonstrated the applicability of scaling to, for example, degree of liberalism, social status, perception of national power, and seriousness of offenses. Steven’s approach to psychophysics thus seems certain to remain in the social and behavioral sciences. His related ambition to create a unity of systems of measurement may be seen as a qualified success.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. A complete bibliography of Stevens’ works would be far too long. See those in Stevens’ Psychophysics, 304–306; and in Moskowitz. Scharf, and Stevens, 447–455.

His classic works include “The Attributes of Tones,” in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 20 (1934), 457–459; Hearing: Its Psychology and Physiology (New York, 1938), with Hallowell Davis; “Theory of the Neural Quantum in the Discrimination of Loudness and Pitch,” in American Journal of Psychology, 54 (1941), 315–335; “On the Theory of Scales of Measurement,” in Science, 103 (1946), 677–680; and “The Surprising Simplicity of Sensory Metrics,” in American Psychologist, 17 (1962), 29–39, repr. in William S. Cain and Lawrence E. Marks, eds., Stimulus and Sensation (Boston, 1971).

On the philosophy of science Stevens wrote “The Operational Basis of Psychology,” in American Journal of Psychology, 47 (1935), 323–330; The Operational Definition of Psychological Concepts,” in Psychological Review, 42 (1935), 517–527; “Psychology: The Propaedeutic Science,” in Philosophy of Science, 3 (1936), 90–103; and “Psychology and the Science of Science,” in Psychological Bulletin, 36 (1939), 221–263.

Stevens’ works on measurement include “On the Problem of Scales for the Measurement of Psychological Magnitudes,” in The Journal of United Science (Erkenntnis), 9 (1939), 94–99; “Mathematics, Measurement, and Psychophysics,” in S. S. Stevens, ed.. Handbook of Experimental Psychology (New York, 1951), 1–49; “The Quantification of Sensation,” in Daedalus, 88 (1959), 606–621; and “The Psychophysics of Sensory Function,” in W. A. Rosenbiith, ed,. Sensory Communication (Cambridge. Mass., 1961).

Popular articles are ‘Machines Cannot Fight Alone,” in American Scientist, 34 (1946), 389–400; “The Science of Noise,” in Atlantic Monthly, 178 , no. 1 (1946), 96; “The New Harvard Psychological Laboratories,” in American Psychologist, 2 (1947), 239–243, with E. G. Boring; “The NAS-NCR and Psychology.” ibid ., 7 (1952), 119–124; and The Market for Miracles: Review of C. E. M. Hansel. ESP: A Scientific Evaluation,” in Contemporary Psychology, 12 (1967), 1–3.

The “new psychophysics” is treated in “The Direct Estimation of Sensory Magnitudes—Loudness,” in American Journal of Psychology, 69 (1956), 1–25; “On the Psychophysical Law, in Psychological Review,” 64 (1957), 153–181: “To Honor Fechner and Repeal His Law, in Science.” 133 (1961), 80–86; “Matching Functions Between Loudness and Ten Other Continua,” in Perception and Psychophysics, 1 (1966), 5–8; “Quantifying the Sensory Experience,” in P. Feyerabend and G. Maxwell, eds.. Mind. Matter, and Method (Minneapolis, 1966): and Psychophysics: Introduction to Its Perceptual, Neural, and Social Prospects. Geraldine Stevens, ed. (New York, 1975).

Autobiographical writings are “Note for a Life Story,” in Howard Moskowitz, Bertram Scharf, and Joseph C. Stevens, eds., Sensation and Measurement: Papers in Honor of S. S. Stevens (Dordrecht and Boston, 1974), 423–446; and “S. S. Stevens.,” in G. Lindzey. Ed. History of Psychology in Autobiography, VI (Englewood Cliffs. N.J., 1974).

The Harvard University Archives houses Stevens’ personal and professional correspondence and other papers (eleven linear feet, about 1931–1973), records of the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory (twelve linear feet, 1940–1972), and some unprocessed records of the laboratory from the war period. Additional wartime laboratory records are at the U.S. National Archives’ Federal Records Center, Waltham, Mass. Material quoted in text has the call number Stevens’ Papers, Harvard Archives, HUG (FP) 2.10, Correspondence and Related Documents.

II. Secondary Literature. Biographical works include Hallowell Davis, “S. Smith Stevens, 1906–1973,” in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 53 (1973), 1190–1192; R. J. W. Mansfield, “Stanley Smith Stevens,” in Journal of the Optical Society of America, 63 (1973), 1022; George A. Miller. “Stanley Smith Stevens,” in Biographical Memoirs, National Academy of Sciences, 47 (1975), 425–459; and Joseph C. Stevens, “Obituary: Professor S. S. Stevens, 1906–1973,” in Vision Research, 14 (1974), 3–5.

For institutional history, see Gordon W. Allport and E. G. Boring, “Psychology and Social Relations at Harvard University,” in American Psychologist, 1 (1946), 119–122; James Phinney Baxter III, Scientists Against Time (Boston, 1946; repr. Cambridge, Mass., 1968); D. W. Fiske, “Naval Aviation Psychology. III. The Special Services Group,,” in American Psychologist, I (1946), 544–548, and “Naval Aviation Psychology. IV. The Central Research Groups.” ibid., 2 (1947), 67–72; W. S. Hunter, “Psychology in the War,” ibid., I (1946), 479–492; Donald Napoli, The Architects of Adjustment (Port Washington, N.Y., 1981); and John M. O’Donnell, “The Crisis of Experimentalism in the 1920s,” in American Psychologist, 34 (1979), 289–295.

Intellectual history is covered in Edwin G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology (New York, 1929; 2nd ed., 1950); Kurt Danziger, “The Positivist Repudiation of Wundt,” in Journal of the History of Behavioral Science, 15 (1979), 205–230, and “The History of Introspection Reconsidered,” ibid., 16 1980), 241–262; Gail A. Hornstein, “Quantifying Psychological Phenomena: Debates, Dilemmas, and Implications” in J. Morawski, ed.. The Rise of Experimentation in American Psychology (New Haven, 1988), 1–34; Edwin B. Newman, On the Origin of ‘Scales of Measurement’, in Howard Moskowitz, Bertram Scharf, and Joseph C. Stevens, eds.. Sensation and Measurement: Papers in Honor of S. S. Stevens (Dordrecht and Boston, 1974), 137–145; and Laurence D. Smith, Behaviorism and Logical Positivism: A Reassessment of the Alliance (Stanford, Calif., 1986).

Scientific critiques are Norman H. Anderson, “Functional Measurement and Psychophysical Judgment,” in Psychological Review, 77 (1970), 153–170, and “Cross–task Validation of Functional Measurement,” in Perception and Psychophysics, 12 (1972), 389–395; N. R. Campbell. “Symposium: Measurement and Its Importance for Philosophy,” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supp. 17 (1938), 121–142; Clyde H. Coombs, Psychology and Mathematics (Ann Arbor. Mich., 1983); Wendell R. Garner. Harold W. Hake, and Charles W. Eriksen, “Operattonism and the Concept of Perception,” in Psychological Review, 63 (1956), 149–159; Sigmund Koch, ed.. Psychology: A Study of a Science (New York, 1959), chapters by B. Rosner. C. H. Graham and P. Ratoosh, and F. Attneave: David H. Krantz,. “A Theory of Magnitude Estimation and Cross-Modality Matching,” in Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 9 (1972), 168–199; R. Duncan Luce, “What Sort of Measurement Is Psychophysical Measurement?” in American Psychologist, 27 (1972), 96–106; Lawrence E. Marks, “On Scales of Sensation: Prolegomena to Any Future Psychophysics That Will Be Able to Come Forth as Science,” in Perceptionand Psychophysical, 16 (1974), 358–376, Sensory Processes: The New Psyvhaphysics (New York, 1974), and “A Theory of Loudness and Loudness Judgments,” in Psychological Review, 86 (1979), 256–285; Roger N. Shepard, “Psychological Relations and Psychophysical Scales: On the Status of ‘Direct’ Psychophysical Measurement,” in Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 24 (1981), 21–57; William C. Stebbins, AnimalPsychophysics: The Design and Conduct of Sensory Experiments (New York, 1970); Patrick Suppes and Joseph L, Zinnes. “Basic Measurement Theory” in R. Duncan Luce et al., eds.. Handbook of Mathematical Psychology (New York, 1963); and Richard M. Warren and Roslyn P. Warren, “A Critique of S. S. Stevens,” in Perceptual and Motor Skills, 16 (1963), 797–810.

Philosophical critiques are Gustav Bergmann and Kenneth W. Spence, “The Logic of Psychophysical Measurement,” in Psychological Review, 51 (1944), 1–24, repr. in Herbert Feigl and May Brodbeck, eds., Readings in the Philosophy of Science (New York, 1953); C. Wade Savage. The Measurement of Sensation (Berkeley, 1970); and G. E. Zuriff. “A Behavioral Interpretation of Psychophysical Scaling,” in Behaviorism, 1 (1972), 118–133.

William R. Woodward