> Now, I finally understand where you are coming from, but I believe it is misconceived. While the mind is indeed a complex construct, cognitive psychology does not treat it as separate from empirical reality.

It doesn't matter what psychologists believe, it is all about what can be proven scientifically.

The reason for the central role of the mind-body problem in philosophy is because scientists and thinkers know them to be distinct -- the mind and the body lie in separate, non-overlapping domains.

The mind is not a physical organ, it is a philosophical construct, therefore it cannot be studied scientifically. Were this not true, there would be no "mind-body problem." But there is, and it is central to psychology's problems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_problem : "It is not obvious how the concept of the mind and the concept of the body relate." That's true, and this issue would need to be conclusively resolved to turn psychology into a science.

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Every scientifically trained person, from Freud to the present, who has studied human psychology, has reluctantly come to the conclusion that psychology is not a science.

In his book "Entwurf einer Psychologie" (1895), Freud said, “Why I cannot fit it together [the organic and the psychological] I have not even begun to fathom.” Knowing that this book would ruin his relations with therapists, Freud ordered that the book not be published during his life.

The published views of many other scientists are available to you if you were curious, all of whom come to the same conclusion.

Under contract to the APA, Sigmund Koch created a six-volume tome (1963) meant to evaluate psychology's scientific standing. Koch concluded, "The hope of a psychological science became indistinguishable from the fact of psychological science. The entire subsequent history of psychology can be seen as a ritualistic endeavor to emulate the forms of science in order to sustain the delusion that it already is a science. The truth is that psychological statements which describe human behavior or which report results from tested research can be scientific. However, when there is a move from describing human behavior to explaining it there is also a move from science to opinion."

In case that quote was lost to you, Koch is saying that psychological measurements follow scientific standards, until it's time to craft a theory, then things fall apart. This is why so many psychologists think psychology is a science -- its has a superficial similarity to science, until it's time to try to explain, to craft a theory.

In a now-famous lecture (1974), Nobel Prizewinner Richard P. Feynman said, "I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call Cargo Cult Science. In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. *So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.*"

Feynman's point is that the appearance of science isn't enough, there must be testable, falsifiable theories, but that is not possible when the thing being studied is not part of nature.

Former APA president Ronald F. Levant (2005) began a campaign to move psychologists toward evidence-based practice, saying, "Some APA members have asked me why I have chosen to sponsor an APA Presidential Initiative on Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) in Psychology, expressing fears that the results might be used against psychologists by managed-care companies and malpractice lawyers." His proposal fell flat on the ground that psychology couldn't possibly adopt EBP -- no scientific evidence, because no science.

Theodore Insel, director of the NIMH for 13 years, regularly exhorted psychologists to adopt science-based standards, finally giving up and resigning in 2015. Insel later wrote an article for Psychology Today in which he explained how 20 billion dollars of science funds were wasted, because ... wait for it ... psychology is not a science. (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sacramento-street-ps...)

All this information -- and much more -- would be available to you if you were willing to critically test your own views ... like a scientist.