I think Admiral Valdemar's comments are a bit reductionistic. One can have a rigorous science of psychology while treating the brain's operations as a "black box". Consider condensed-matter and gas-state physics and chemistry. This sort of subject can be treated in a very rigorous way while treating the internal workings of atoms as "black boxes". In fact, before the mid-twentieth-century, that's how they were treated. When Dmitri Mendeleev predicted the properties of some undiscovered elements, he did not know a thing about quantum chemistry. Yet he succeeded.
But from quantum chemistry, one can derive all of the aforementioned physics. One can find the sizes of atoms and the configurations and energies of chemical bonds from first principles, rather than treating them as "fudge factors" to be found experimentally.
[This message has been edited by lpetrich, 12-17-2003]
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