Everyday life is characterized by conscious purposiveness. From reaching for food to designing an experiment, our actions are directed at goals. This purposiveness reveals itself partly in our conscious awareness, partly in the organization of our thought and action. Everyday life is thus an obvious, seemingly ideal place to begin, filled with promise for development of cognitive theory.
This promise has been tantalizing in the original Greek sense of that term: Tantalos, a son of Zeus and a king, was condemned in the afterlife to stand, racked with hunger and thirst, amid fruit-laden boughs in water up to his chin---with the fruit and water receding at each attempt to eat and drink. Many present-day psychologists feel like Tantalos. Our awareness of our feelings, desires, and goals ought to have shown the way to deeper understanding. Our immediate experience ought to have lighted a path to scientific theory. Many writers have sought to develop psychological theory on the basis of conscious experience. But, as with Tantalos, the sought-for understanding has receded at each attempt to eat and drink.