Why Psychology Cannot Be Salvaged: A Relational Critique

Introduction: The Problem with Psychology

Psychology presents itself as the science of mind, yet its foundational assumptions have long been ontologically misguided. From its inception, the field has treated mind as an interior domain, a container of representations, processes, and mechanisms. Mainstream models posit attention as a filter, memory as storage, emotion as internal content, and cognition as symbolic computation. These metaphors—drawn from 19th-century physics, 20th-century cybernetics, and computational theory—have persisted for over a century, producing a field that is superficially scientific yet fundamentally misaligned with the phenomena it claims to study.

The central claim of this critique is stark: psychology cannot be salvaged from within. Its foundational metaphysics—interiority, mechanism, and representation—is incompatible with the relational dynamics that constitute mind. Any attempt to patch its categories or refine its methods will leave the core miscut unaddressed. To understand why, we must first examine the errors of its inherited ontology.

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1. Psychology’s Miscut of Phenomenon

Three persistent fallacies underpin psychology’s conceptual framework:

1. The Interiorisation Fallacy
   Psychology assumes cognition occurs “inside” the organism, separate from environment. Sensation, memory, and thought are treated as internal phenomena awaiting representation or processing. In reality, the mind is a relational event, co-actualised with the environment. There is no bounded interior space in which information resides.

2. The Representation Fallacy
   Cognition is presumed to manipulate symbols or stored content. Perception is thought to create internal models; memory preserves them; attention selects from them. Representational models presuppose that experience is a copy of reality rather than the actualisation of relational potential.

3. The Mechanism Fallacy
   Attention, emotion, and memory are explained as modules, systems, or processes, giving rise to the illusion that cognition occurs in discrete functional units. Mechanism treats causality as local, linear, and computable, ignoring the ecological, metabolic, and nested dynamics that actually govern living systems.

Consequences: psychological categories—attention, emotion, memory, perception—are misdescribed abstractions, not first-order relational phenomena. They appear coherent only because the field persists in ignoring the ontology that would otherwise invalidate them.

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2. Relational Ontology as Corrective

A relational ontology offers a radical corrective. Mind is not internal; it is horizon ecology, the structured modulation of potential across scales. The Cognitive Thread series demonstrates how this framework recasts every core category:

• Attention is horizon contraction: the controlled narrowing of potential to stabilise actionable gradients.

• Emotion is metabolic readiness modulation: the tuning of energy and elasticity across gradients, not interior feeling.

• Memory is horizon-binding: ecological scaffolding of potential, not storage of representations.

• Construal is the actualisation cut: first-order meaning emerges when potential stabilises into phenomenon.

• Intuition and Analysis are divergent readiness modes: wide versus narrow horizon management, not systems or modules.

• Mind as multi-scale negotiation is the orchestration of these dynamics across nested temporal and ecological scales.

Relational ontology does not “fix” psychology. It renders its categories obsolete: what psychology treats as internal mechanisms are actually ecological strategies enacted across the organism–environment nexus.

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3. Case Studies of Misdescription

1. Attention: The spotlight or filter metaphor assumes selection among inputs. Relationally, attention is the contraction of the horizon, a topological reconfiguration of potential. Resource models are incoherent; there is no internal “capacity,” only metabolic cost of maintaining constrained readiness.

2. Emotion: Affect as content misdescribes what is actually the modulation of readiness. Fear narrows horizons and amplifies sensitivity; joy widens them. These are metabolic strategies, not internal feelings.

3. Memory: Storage metaphors obscure the reality that memory is the temporary stabilisation of potential, supported by environmental scaffolds. Forgetting is the natural relaxation of bound potentials, not loss of stored content.

4. Perception and Construal: Representational models collapse under relational analysis. Experience arises when potential stabilises through the actualisation cut. There is no “raw data” awaiting interpretation; there is only relational emergence.

5. Cognition as Strategy: Intuition and analysis are not modules; they are modes of readiness, strategies for managing horizon width and coupling bandwidth to match the ecological demands of the task.

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4. Why Psychology Cannot Recover

Psychology is institutionally and epistemologically committed to its flawed metaphysics. Its empirical successes—reaction time experiments, neuroimaging correlations, behavioural predictions—are correlations of miscut phenomena, not causal explanations.

Attempts to update or salvage the field (predictive processing, cognitive neuroscience, computational modelling) layer new mechanisms atop misdescribed relational events, producing partial insights without addressing the fundamental ontological error.

Unless psychology abandons interiority, representation, and mechanism, it cannot generate a coherent theory of mind.

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5. The Productive Alternative

The Cognitive Thread shows a coherent alternative:

• Mind is nested, multi-scale horizon management, integrating attention, emotion, memory, construal, and readiness.

• All cognition is relational, ecological, and non-representational.

• Phenomena emerge from stabilised relational potentials, not stored content or processed symbols.

• Learning, expertise, and creativity are sedimented adjustments of readiness patterns across scales, not accumulation of representations.

Psychology is not merely flawed; it is superseded by relational ontology.

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6. Conclusion: Psychology as Historical Artefact

Psychology can be studied historically, sociologically, or culturally, but as a discipline claiming to describe cognition, it cannot succeed. Its conceptual mistakes are structural, not empirical. The only way forward is to reorient mind as relational, attention as horizon contraction, emotion as metabolic tuning, memory as scaffolding, and construal as the actualisation cut.

The relational framework does not “correct” psychology; it dissolves it. What remains is a coherent, biologically grounded, and ecologically embedded understanding of mind: a nested, multi-scale orchestration of potential that negotiates relational fields across time, space, and ecological context.

Mind is not inside. Mind is the horizon itself in motion.