The Enlightenment Gap: Why Psychology Has No Unified Paradigm

The concept of the Enlightenment Gap identifies the deepest structural failure underlying psychology, psychotherapy, and the broader crisis of meaning. It has two distinct dimensions that must not be conflated. The Ontological dimension concerns the absence of any consensually agreed-upon framework for placing mind in relation to matter — the hard problem of consciousness and the mind-body problem remain unresolved at the level of paradigmatic consensus. The epistemological dimension concerns the absence of any agreed-upon framework for integrating scientific knowledge with subjective and intersubjective knowledge — what Gregg Henriques's Unified Theory of Knowledge (UTOK) identifies as the three vectors of knowing: objective, subjective, and intersubjective.

Psychology is the first discipline in the tree of knowledge where paradigmatic consensus collapses, and this is not accidental. It sits precisely at the intersection of both unresolved dimensions. It attempts to be a natural science of mind, yet there is no shared Ontology of mind and no shared Epistemology for how subjective and relational phenomena can be studied scientifically. The conflation of these two distinct gaps — treating the Ontological confusion as if it were merely an epistemological one, or vice versa — is itself a symptom of the problem.

This analysis reframes psychology's fragmentation not as a sign of disciplinary immaturity but as a predictable consequence of foundational philosophical incoherence inherited from the Enlightenment. It also explains why psychotherapy lacks a unified scientific foundation and why the crisis of meaning remains intractable: these are downstream effects of a gap that no amount of empirical data alone can close.