An experimental investigation of the measurability of auditory sensation

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Abstract
The conception of a "scale of sensation" has been the centre of a considerable amount of discussion in psychological literature. Confining attention to the question of intensity it has been admitted that the formulation of a scale relating sensation-intensity to stimulus-intensity may be a matter of difficulty and doubt even for one particular sense, and for different senses different relations may hold; but it has been commonly supposed that theoretically there must be some such relations. In other words a particular strength of sensation must be uniquely associated with a particular stimulus, and this sensation may be measured, that is, assigned a quantitaive value on a scale, which may be empirical, but is none the less a scale of magnitude of sensation. This assumption has been questioned (Myers, 1931) usually from the theoretical side; it is pointed out that more or less unverifiable or at best unverified, assumptions are made in the formulation of such supposed scales. Thus in the case of sound the decibel is often regarded as a measure of loudness-sensation, but this has been criticized not only on the experimental ground that the scale of decibels may not in fact run parallel with the true scale of loudnesses, but that it is actually only a scale of stimuli and not a measure of sensation at all.

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