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These three authors are well-known psychologists who have contributed to the literature of their discipline in various ways. Sarbin first addressed himself to the main issue of the book under review in 1941 when he wrote an essay, The Relative Accuracy of Clinical and Statistical Predictions of Academic Achievement. This was followed by A Contribution to the Study of Actuarial and Individual Methods of Prediction, published in 1943. In 1944, The Logic of Prediction in Psychology appeared. An Essay on Inference in the Psychological Sciences (1952), by Sarbin and Taft, was the stimulus for Meehl's treatise on Clinical Versus Statistical Prediction which appeared in 1954. The present volume attempts to answer some of Meehl's criticisms of the earlier propositions and to elaborate further some of the theoretical assumptions previously presented by Sarbin and Taft.
At first glance this book may not seem of concern to psychoanalysts, but the conclusion that 'clinical inference is only a special form of statistical inference' merits further investigation and consideration. The authors support their view by a cognitive theory; they seek to demonstrate how the inferrer's major premises are formed and how secondary premises are created through the classification (or 'instantiation', to use the authors' terminology) of occurrences. Where tables of formal or informal explicit experience are absent, the clinician recognizes explicitly that his judgments, which may be far-reaching, are made on the basis of unconfirmed hypotheses, intuitively derived. The authors state that wherever experience tables are available for the prediction of conduct, inferences