The Non-Analytical Basis of Clinical Reasoning

This paper explores the assertion that much of clinical diagnostic thinking is based on the rapid and unconscious matching of the presenting problem to a similar, previously encountered, problem. This ‘non-analytic’ form of concept formation has been described in the psychology literature for over a decade. From this theory, we deduce and test several hypotheses: 1) Diagnosis is based in part on similarity to a particular previous example. In …