ABSTRACT
Gwen is asked if the chips perceptually match and is told to respond simply yes or no. She says “Yes”. Now the psychophysicist feels better placed to accuse Gwen of making perceptual error. The issue is doubly irrelevant to psychophysics. The phenomenal ordering and organization of the gray scale provides the very rationale for its perceptual study. If psychophysics is to be an interesting domain of inquiry, psychological phenomena and their accompanying judgments of appearance must be given their due. A small, albeit growing, number of psychophysicists take the opposite extreme, and along with it reject the measuring device model. The account of psychophysics being recommended has strong affinities to the pluralist, irrealist ideas that Goodman has long defended. In psychophysics the main alternatives seem to be either to adopt a realist measuring device metaphor or an Idealist world-as-illusion metaphor.
