I think you're putting a lot of weight on "study the mind" versus "study the brain." Not many psychologists are dualists.
They tend to say "mind" because they want to abstract over the actual hardware--they're interested in studying what happens in the skull, not how it is implemented. This doesn't make it any less scientific than a biologist who studies where birds fly while neglecting the aerodynamics of the birds' wings.
> They tend to say "mind" because they want to abstract over the actual hardware--they're interested in studying what happens in the skull, not how it is implemented.
Yes, but asking what isn't science by itself, which tries to say how a particular observation came about.
Also, psychologists don't really know what's happening inside our skulls. Studying the mind can't tell us what the brain is doing or how, any more than a computer display can tell us how a CPU works -- for the latter, we need access to the source, not its external manifestation.
* If I say, “The night sky is filled with tiny points of light,” I've offered a description. Another observer might contradict my description, for example by emerging from his cave on an overcast night and not seeing any points of light, but the contradicting observation can itself be contradicted on the next clear night, without any chance for resolution. So, apart from being shallow, inconclusive and trivial, it's not science.
* If I say, “Those points of light are distant thermonuclear furnaces like our sun,” I've offered an explanation, one that makes predictions about phenomena not yet observed and that's falsifiable by empirical test. On the basis of this explanation we might build a small-scale star (a fusion reactor) to see if our experiment shows any similarity to the spectra and behavior of stars. This deep explanation represents a theoretical claim that's linked to other areas of human knowledge, predicts phenomena not yet observed and is conclusively falsifiable by comparison with reality (our fusion reactor might fail to imitate the stars). It's science.
> This doesn't make it any less scientific ...
But it does -- one cannot falsify an observation, one can only contradict it.
> This doesn't make it any less scientific than a biologist who studies where birds fly ...
If the biologist only records where the birds flew, it's not science. If he crafts a testable, falsifiable theory about why the birds flew there, that might be science. Science is about crafting theories that go beyond simple observation, that explain them and suggest new phenomena not yet observed.
They tend to say "mind" because they want to abstract over the actual hardware--they're interested in studying what happens in the skull, not how it is implemented. This doesn't make it any less scientific than a biologist who studies where birds fly while neglecting the aerodynamics of the birds' wings.