ABSTRACT

Intellectual disciplines, much like the people who engender them , ofttimes experience their own seven ages . By my reckoning, psychophysics entered its early middle age around the second to third decade or so of this century-around the time that Richardson and Ross (1930) devised the first, albeit primitive, version of the method of magnitude estimation . But 1930 was a bit too early for such procedures to take hold , and it was a quartercentury later that Smitty Stevens (1957) thwarted psychophysics's incipient mid-life crisis by reintroducing to the discipline, expanding, and expounding what he called ratio scaling methods .