>Because I've cured the common cold, and because I've met all the requirements that psychology recognizes for science, I deserve a Nobel Prize. Yes or no?
I take a different tack on this. The primary failing in the "science" of your thought experiment is that you had no control group to measure the effect of your cure against. If, on the other hand, your cure was statistically-significantly better than control in double-blinded randomized tests, then I think you would deserve the Nobel Prize, even if you couldn't proffer a theory for why it worked. Every theory humans have ever invented had at the bottom level something akin to "Well, those are just the rules and this is the way they work.". Lacking an elaborate, fleshed out framework to understand underlying mechanisms for your cure shouldn't even really be a serious problem, so long as your cure hypothesis is falsifiable.
I take a different tack on this. The primary failing in the "science" of your thought experiment is that you had no control group to measure the effect of your cure against. If, on the other hand, your cure was statistically-significantly better than control in double-blinded randomized tests, then I think you would deserve the Nobel Prize, even if you couldn't proffer a theory for why it worked. Every theory humans have ever invented had at the bottom level something akin to "Well, those are just the rules and this is the way they work.". Lacking an elaborate, fleshed out framework to understand underlying mechanisms for your cure shouldn't even really be a serious problem, so long as your cure hypothesis is falsifiable.