Sinatra, Maria (Author)
Physis: Rivista Internazionale di Storia della Scienza
Volume: 54
Pages: 175-192
The essay opens with Newton’s explanations of color mixtures, which led to the nativist-empiricist controversies that broke out in the nineteenth century, i.e.: did the experience of color occur subjectively or objectively? The starting point to approach the issue was Thomas Young’s theory of the three distinct modes of sensation in the retina, each produced in different degrees by the different rays. This theory ramified into lines of divergent theoretical and methodological conceptions of the nature of light and color. On the one hand some of the scientists of the period, including Hering, Plateau, Osann, etc., interpreted such phenomena as being produced by direct physiological mechanism in the retina; on the other hand, Chevreul, Goethe, Helmholtz, Fechner read the same phenomena in terms of subjective, inferential effects. However, the focus of the essay is the Osann-Fechner controversy about contrasting colors and the colored shadows experiment. On the basis of his many experiments, Fechner deduced that color perception could not originate objectively in the nature of the external stimulus, as Osann had argued, but it should instead be attributed – in line with Helmholtz – to unconscious errors of judgements.
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