How to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Abduction is the solution to pseudo-empiricism

Few scholars can be said to have provided the scientific community with such a clear and simple idea that also has the disruptive power to outline a paradigm shift in psychology. Jan Smedslund is one of them, having given us the notion of Pseudoempirical Research (Smedslund 1991; see also 1982, 1988, 1992, 1995, 2016). Pseudoempirical research is the research that empirically tests a hypothesis that can be known from reasoning on what is conceptually implied by the knowledge grounding the hypothesis itself. “The sum of a triangle’s angles is 180°” is a paradigmatic instance of a priori and noncontingent proposition provided by Smedslund. Research aimed at measuring the angles of a triangle would be pseudoempirical because it is already known that their sum is 180° since this is logically implied in the definition of triangle itself.