10.2—
The Appeal of a Mature Psychology

It should be abundantly clear that any developments that could bring all or part of psychology towards either or both of these kinds of maturity would be of major importance. Indeed, in the case of psychology, the absence of these kinds of maturity has been a large factor contributing to the widespread sentiment that psychology is not and perhaps cannot be a mature science. Consider first the matter of mathematization. Psychological explanation has traditionally been among the least systematic bodies of explanation among those disciplines that aspire to the name of science. Even higher-level disciplines such as economics have a stock of mathematical laws that describe their subject matter, even if only under "ideal" conditions. But while psychology has made inroads in terms of measurement of abilities (particularly in perceptual psychophysics), and seems susceptible to statistical generalizations over populations, the kind of explanation that takes place about and in terms of cognitive states has been notoriously resistant even to rough generalization, much less mathematization.^[8]

The situation is little better with connectivity. While it is the case that some higher-level disciplines such as economics proceed on assumptions about cognition (e.g., rational decision making), the connections between psychology and lower -level disciplines such as neurology and biology (not to mention physics) have been at once contentious and unedifying. On the one hand, there has long been almost universal agreement that there are systematic and "special" connections between mind and brain. Even Descartes, notorious to many as the arch-dualist, attributed a wide array of psychological processes to the brain and nervous system, reserving only language, reasoning, and the will for the immaterial soul.^[9] Descartes also viewed the connection between soul and body

as extremely intimate—far more so than that between a pilot and the ship he steers—and probably sui generis (Meditation VI [AT VII. 81]). On the other hand, the nature of such a "special connection" has been elusive both philosophically and empirically. The philosophers cannot seem to agree on what the precise nature of the "special connection" might (or must) be, and the empirical scientists have been hard pressed to discern what the elements on the neurological (physiological, physical) side of the relationship might be. If one of the marks of a mature psychology would be having discoveries of the form "Mental phenomenon M bears special relation R to neurological phenomenon N ," there seem to be two problems: the scientists cannot discover what N is, and the philosophers cannot decide what R has to be. To put it very mildly, it would be great progress if one could find a way beyond this old and frustrating impasse.

Now modern psychology has, in fact, made some progress on some fronts. There has been some significant quantification of perceptual psychophysics, and quantification of at least some of the observations in cognitive psychology. At the same time, neuroscience has emerged as a distinct offshoot of physiology that can draw upon other formal and empirical disciplines. Problems that were known to Helmholtz but unsolvable in his day are now solvable due to advances in mathematics (see Grossberg 1980). And the localization of mental functions in the brain has been greatly aided by more exacting and less intrusive observational techniques, such as those supplied by magnetic resonance imaging. But until recently the domain of cognition seemed largely untouched by these advances.