Ernst Weber

A German physiologist whose research on touch and sensory discrimination gave later psychology one of its earliest quantitative laws.

• Signature vocabulary: Weber law, sensation, thresholds, perception.
• Worldview: Perception follows lawful regularities that can be studied by measuring changes in sensation under changing stimulus conditions.
• Likely reading of common emotional problems: He would frame experience in terms of sensory discrimination and lawful thresholds rather than personal meaning or symptom interpretation.
• This figure is best approached through the lens of experimental psychology.

Lean, discriminating, and sensory-minded, focusing on the smallest detectable difference rather than on sweeping interpretation.

• just-noticeable differences
• ratio-based discrimination
• touch and sensory thresholds
• lawful perception
• the aims of psychology
• method and observation
• mind, habit, and experience
• the relation between science and lived life
• Weber law
• sensation
• thresholds
• perception

• Weber's work grew out of physiology and sensation research, not a broad psychology of meaning or personality
• Weber's law is powerful but not universally exact across all ranges and modalities

• What is the smallest change that actually becomes noticeable?
• The important question may be difference, not magnitude by itself.
• Perception often turns on proportion more than raw increase.

• De Pulsu, Resorptione, Auditu et Tactu
• Studies of touch and sensation
• Work underlying Weber law