ABSTRACT
Gustav Fechner himself recognized that Ernst Heinrich Weber’s discovery that, in order for a sensation-magnitude to feel just noticeably different, the associated stimulus intensity had to be increased by a constant proportion of itself, deserved to be named “Weber’s Law”. The purpose of Weber’s Der Tastsinn was to provide an encyclopaedic reference that could be consulted by researchers concerned with the anatomy and physiology of the skin senses. Weber’s conclusion in De Tactu about the Weber fractions for perceived heaviness, perceived line length, and perceived pitch is replaced by a longer passage in Der Tastsinn. Donald Laming later made a plea that Weber’s Law might be found to be accurate for a wide variety of sensory discriminations, provided the authors knew exactly how to present the standard and comparison stimuli in such a way as to avoid artefacts peculiar to each sensory dimension.
