There is an irony in the debate about whether psychology should be considered a science. The more important question is whether science is a psychology. And I’m here to argue that it most definitely is and it matters a great deal that we recognize it as such. Where did science come from in the first place? I’m impressed with David Wooburton’s account in The Invention of Science which argues that science began to gain a foothold in renaissance Europe when it became clear that there were certain features of the natural world that could not be explained by the ancients. Prime among these features was the discovery of America. Until this moment in European history, and particularly during the renaissance, the basic method for knowledge seeking was to look to the great thinkers of the past: the Greek thinkers for secular matters, and the Christian scriptures for the sacred. Thus one of the cries of renaissance was the Latin term ad fontes or “to the sources.” Meaning, to the ancient textual sources. During this period most everyone thought that all things worth knowing had already been thought of and many of them had been lost. Therefore, scouring ancient manuscripts was the best way to gain knowledge. The fact that this idea seems very strange to us shows just how much humanity has advanced. We now think that the future is the best source of knowledge about the world, not the past. The all important discovery of the renaissance was not that the earth is a globe, but simply that there was a huge landmass between Europe and India. The ancients knew nothing about this, and scholars, who were accustomed to surveying the world from the comfort of their desks through the telescope of their ancient texts, were caught off guard. They lacked the tools to handle America, for the only way one could find out about this new thing was to go out there and discover it, see it, touch it, measure it, and yes, conquer it. Imagine how we would feel today if we suddenly discovered that there is a second earth superimposed on ours which could be accessed by a new device or method, and you will have some sense of how much tension the old ways of knowing must have come under. Of course, there followed many other discoveries, which I won’t rehearse here because they are all part of the well-trod history of science. The important point is that over a couple centuries discoveries about how the world works led to a revaluation of how we should understand the world. Not, the growing consensus argued, by reading the opinions of ancient experts, or by relying on the pronouncements of religious texts, but by getting our hands and feet dirty. Many scientists of the past, as now, were happy to go about the task of discovering the world and did not stop to think too much about epistemology. And yet, they were nevertheless implementing a new and practical approach to knowledge, whether they reflected on this or not. And it was this new approach to knowledge seeking that made all the difference. This new way of thinking was itself the scientific revolution. It’s not like ancient people didn’t observe the world and draw conclusions and usefully harness nature to meet human needs. Humans have always done this. The difference in the scientific revolution was the level of discipline that was applied to the task, and the growing awareness that religion and metaphysics should not override practical discoveries. This is seen quite clearly in the writings of Francis Bacon, who was not a scientist himself but rather a theoretician of science. Bacon had a very sophisticated understanding of the ways in which the mind, or human nature, could easily deceive us and why it was important to use disciplined observation and experimentation to overcome those biases. His famous “idols of the mind” are the first listicle of cognitive biases: Perception of the world is altered by the human perceiver in ways that are unique to every individual, the words we use often hide more than they reveal, tradition and so called common sense make us think we understand things when we don’t. Bacon’s answer to these and other problems he catalogs is, simply, the scientific method; disciplined observation of the world coupled with experimentation. Bacon maintained that if we combine all these vetted observations of the world into one system of knowledge, leaving no room for leaps of the imagination, we will arrive at a true–and powerful–view of the world. The scientific method is the answer to the question: how do we overcome cognitive biases? And it’s a brilliant, epoch-defining solution which would solve all the problems in the world, if only people would consistently apply it. Which is to say if only people weren’t people. Those who argue that psychology does not rise to the level of a “real” science because its subject matter is too, let’s say, squishy and inexact, are missing a very large point: science itself is probably the best product of psychology. And psychology should own this. The scientific method is such a successful psychological tool that it works incognito, as all excellent solutions do, such that practitioners of the hard sciences can essentially pretend that their task only involves observing things and coming to rational conclusions, as is completely natural to do. But it is not “completely natural” to treat human observation, experimentation, and reasoning as a sure source of knowledge. This was a very hard to come by insight, and we came by it through observing how we think and inventing corrective measures to counteract the limitations of the mind. The only reason psychology can be posited as an inexact science is that the study of human thought and behavior is the most difficult of all tasks for humans to undertake. So, let’s turn this around, hard scientists: psychology isn’t your annoying kid brother. It’s your daddy. If psychology was crucial to the inception of science, we must also recognize that psychological factors are now, more than ever, the things that are holding back science from bestowing its bounty on humanity. We might be approaching a point of satiation in which scientific advances become increasingly irrelevant simply because people are confused about what is true, accurate, and helps humans thrive. What if science creates a true, objectively verifiable, and useful body of knowledge that no one believes?