Clinical and experimental practices in psychology: kinds of inferences

Recently, psychologists’ attention has been drawn to the procedures of theory construction, that is to say, to the processes involved in the quest for sound explanations of psychological phenomena. It is a matter of fact that the various areas of psychology have their own peculiarities but nonetheless they also show some commonalities regarding the study of the phenomena they deal with. In particular, clinical and experimental practices have different methods, objects of inquiry and areas of application but they seem to share some inferential procedures in order to improve their results. In this contribution, we’ll focus upon two specific kinds of inference, abduction and the hypothetical-deductive (H-D) method.