Cassedy Steven
Department of Literature, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0410, USA.
J Hist Neurosci. 2008;17(4):405-32. doi: 10.1080/09647040701296861.
The term stimulus, as it was used in science from its earliest appearance in the sixteenth century up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, shows a gradual progress in denotation from the physical object designed to produce nervous and muscular excitation to the generically conceived event or object that initiates sensory or motor activity. To this shift corresponds a shift in the understanding of sensory experience. Johannes Muller's law of specific energy of sensory nerves played a major role in the shift, and Hermann von Helmholtz gave the shift its most thorough philosophical explanation.
“刺激”这一术语，从16世纪最早出现在科学领域直至19世纪初，其外延呈现出逐步的演变，从旨在产生神经和肌肉兴奋的物理对象，发展到引发感觉或运动活动的广义概念上的事件或对象。这种转变与对感觉经验的理解转变相对应。约翰内斯·米勒的感觉神经特殊能量定律在这一转变中发挥了主要作用，而赫尔曼·冯·亥姆霍兹则对这一转变给出了最为全面的哲学解释。
