On the meaning of statements in psychophysics characterizing conditional indeterminacy of percepts

ABSTRACT: We propose a conceptual framework for the interpretation of statements in the psychophysical literature (especially concerning spatial vision) that represent a combinatorial (rather than probabilistic) way of evaluating the strength of stimulus-percept relationships. First, we introduce elementary set-theoretic guidelines (Section 2), and then we explain some exemplary statements from psychophysics following those lines (Section 3). After that, we discuss five basic questions which are implied by the assumptions in the conceptual framework and appear crucial for its prospects (Section 4). Lastly, we highlight some peculiarities of the framework by a comparison with the probabilistic approach in vision psychophysics (Section 5).