Key Terms

Nomic: Law-like or universal relationship.

Idealization: In normal cases of scientific idealization theorists ignore certain negligible parameters in real systems to formulate a law. The resulting law, though not strictly true of any actual system, proves predictively adequate, and quantifies a real relation in actual physical systems.

Psychophysics: This term has traditionally stood for methods that quantified thresholds.  But it is more generally used to signify the study of of the relationship in perception between stimulus properties and subjective experience.