The Problem of Psychology

The Problem of Psychology

Everyone knows that psychology is a difficult subject, especially psychologists. But why? Why isn’t it as advanced as physics and chemistry, or even biology? The mind has been around for a long time and so have our cognitive faculties (though less time), and it’s not as if we are not curious about it. Yet our psychological knowledge seems primitive in comparison, laughably superficial. What is the problem? It is commonly said that the reason is that psychology is a young science; we just haven’t been doing it as long as the other sciences. This is an unconvincing answer: why haven’t we been doing it as long? Is it really being claimed that if only we had started earlier psychology would be as advanced as the other sciences? It seems to be held in some quarters that philosophy was holding psychology back: it kept psychology to itself and wouldn’t allow it to employ scientific methods for some obscure reason. Tosh! Natural philosophy used to deal with physics and chemistry and yet that didn’t stop them from developing into the empirical sciences. Clearly, there must be a deeper reason why psychology is relatively immature; but you will not find a psychology textbook that explains why. After all, we have direct access to our own minds by introspection, and we interact with people with minds every day—and yet we don’t know much serious psychology. If we had that kind of access to the stars, we would have developed astronomy much earlier than we did! And it simply isn’t true that applying scientific methods in psychology has led to ground-breaking discoveries comparable to those of physics, chemistry, and biology; psychology is still relatively retarded.

Is it that minds are just incredibly complicated, much more so that lumps of matter, stars, and organisms? It might be true that minds are more complicated (whatever that means), but it is hard to believe that this is the reason for the lack of advancement. It isn’t as if we have looked into the mind and thought “Wow, that is socomplicated!” The mind isn’t even that big. The reason isn’t ontological—based on the nature of the mind itself. No, it is epistemological: we don’t have the right means to know it. It is the epistemic capacities of psychologists that cause the problem not the intrinsic nature of the mind. This is really quite obvious: we don’t have the ability to see directly into the mind, or to examine it under a microscope. The human senses are not geared to acquiring knowledge about minds. Psychology would be different if we could inspect the mind up close and simply see how it works. Nor is it introspectively accessible in its deep workings. We are cognitively cut off from direct knowledge of the mind and have to infer it from observable clues. A glaring example of this is child development: we just don’t remember much about our childhood. Thus, we can’t just ask people what was going on in their minds when they were babies, or ask babies themselves. Adults have no memories of these early psychological stages. We can’t settle the question of innate ideas by asking people whether they had this or that idea in the womb. A Freudian can’t ask a middle-aged man whether he desired sex with his mother as an infant and expect to get an answer. And the same is true of other areas of psychological interest: perception, intelligence, memory, attention, imagination, reasoning, motivation, emotion, personality, language, dreams, creativity, etc. We just don’t have access to these faculties by any direct means; we have to approach them from afar with whatever means we have at our disposal. Psychology is difficult because we are not cut out for it (we are hardly cut out for scientific knowledge in general, which is why it took so long to develop). Biology (the genes) didn’t make us natural psychologists (in the scientific sense). Why should it?

We can appreciate the true situation by imagining a species of alien psychologists with different epistemic capacities. Suppose these psychologists knew their stuff innately: they were born knowing the correct theories of the mind, their own and others. They know scientific psychology as we know our language—instinctively. For example, they know exactly how many kinds of memory there are, how memories are stored in the brain, what forgetting is, etc. Nothing about the mind is puzzling to them; and their predictive powers are phenomenal. They have all the psychological knowledge we will have in a thousand years and more. For them psychology is old hat, common knowledge, nothing to write home about. They know how the mind works (nothing to do with computation, it turns out). When these aliens come to Earth, they instantly figure out everything about human psychology (it’s a good bit simpler than their psychology). They are born equipped with all the psychological knowledge anyone could need (they also have advanced knowledge of physics). We know what we know of scientific psychology partly on the basis of our innate knowledge of folk psychology; they just know more than we do innately. We probably would know almost nothing of psychology without our innate endowment, but that innate knowledge doesn’t extend to the whole of the mind. It is contingent what we know innately, and we just don’t know that much psychology that way; we have to acquire such knowledge as we have painstakingly. Unfortunately, our scientific methods are not well designed for gaining deep psychological knowledge—we can’t even use the psychological equivalent of particle accelerators. We have yet to observe a psychological particle, if there are any. Psychology is difficult because we are not naturally much good at it, sorry to say. All our sciences are limited by our human science-forming capacity (to borrow Chomsky’s term); well, our psychology is very so limited. In some possible worlds we might be born expert psychologists, but not in the actual world. Do you think other animals could make much progress with establishing a scientific psychology? The problem is not that we came to the subject late in the day; it is that we came to it. The problem of psychology is our psychology as psychologists. The problem of cognitive science is the cognitive science of us.

The problem is acute in clinical psychology and psychiatry: we understand these subjects so poorly because we don’t have access to their causes and underlying processes. We can’t just look into the machinery and see what the pathology is and how to cure it. Freud used free association and the like, but this approach is limited at best. If only we could make the unconscious conscious, but no one has come up with the technology to do that. None of these problems will be solved merely by the passage of time and big grants, though we may be able to make some useful inferences. But don’t count on it; psychology might be in much the same state a thousand years from now, give or take a bit. Physical medicine might improve tremendously in the coming years, but mental medicine is a different proposition. Minds are just hard for us to know about, our own and others. How do we remember? No amount of remembering will tell you that. The problems of psychology are methodological, i.e., epistemological, and they are deep-seated. They are endemic not historical.[1]

[1] The methodological problems of other sciences were solved, partially at least, by fortuitous circumstances and technological innovation: microscopes, telescopes, fossils, light transmissions from space, prisms, X-rays, particle accelerators, etc. But no such luck has helped us in psychology: no instruments that reveal inner structure and hidden operations, no information-laden light coming from within the mind, no dissections, no atom smashers, no litmus tests, no staining techniques. We are on our own in psychology (the tachistoscope is a limited instrument). No wonder we know so little. Just think how retarded astronomy would be if we received no light from elsewhere in the universe and had never invented the telescope! We really need something like Mr. Spock’s mind-meld or a working mind-meter or souped-up telepathy. But we are stuck with training our eyes and ears on external behavior.