ABSTRACT
Why was alchemy a scientific dead-end? Its aim is attainable and potentially profitable, and yet the whole enterprise was, in fact, a waste of time. It failed because it assumed something that isn’t so: that because a problem is salient and can be clearly posed, it should also be attacked directly.
Contemporary psychology is in many respects the alchemy of the mind. Both behaviorism and cognitivism have their own shibboleths. In the case of behaviorism, it was the practical objective that dominated. But behaviorists’ interests were to change the world, not to understand it, so they leaped from fragmentary knowledge to sweeping recommendations about social policy and private action.
The errors of contemporary cognitive psychology are preoccupation with the human mind, with information rather than action, and with taking ordinary language at face value. Human memory, thought, feelings, ideas, and consciousness, like lead and gold, are the currency of daily discourse. Just as the alchemists studied gold because gold is what they were after, so the cognitive scientists study the thoughts and feelings of human beings, because the human mind is what they wish to understand. But several decades of research into the psychology and neurobiology of human mental life have yielded disappointingly little.
