What can psychological science tell us about human behavior that the other sciences can ?
The physical sciences are making dramatic discoveries about the universe, the cell, the gene, and as a result, biologists, chemists and physicists have become overly confident. There’s even a small group of neuroscientists who believe that once we know what’s happening in the brain, we will be able to explain all psychological phenomena in the language of biology. I disagree with that assumption. It is not possible to translate my emotional state at this moment into sentences that only have biological words, like circuits, neurons and neurotransmitters. Psychological phenomena occur at the end of a long cascade of events that began with a brain event, but the end of the cascade—a feeling of guilt, anger or pleasure—has to have its own special vocabulary. Neuroscientists are confident that one day they will be able to predict what a person is thinking, feeling or planning to do by measuring their brain state. But each brain state permits an envelope of psychological possibilities, not o
