ABSTRACT
The first criticism backed by new experimental data came from the father of American philosophical pragmatism assisted by a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. Charles S. Peirce drew from Gustav Fechner’s deeper concerns about thresholds a solid criticism with which to discipline Fechner’s errant reasonings. Fechner argued that: There is a certain paradox inherent in the nature of the threshold. Peirce drew from Fechner’s deeper concerns about thresholds a solid criticism with which to discipline Fechner’s errant reasonings. To balance the possible effects of differential sensitivity to increases or decreases, the trials were divided into blocks within which only a fixed difference between pressures occurred. Peirce and Jacob Jastrow showed that their error proportions derived from a single Gaussian distribution by using the Method of Least Squares to estimate a probable error common to all stimuli.
