Paradigms, promises, and the potential of clinical psychology

Both Plaud's and Ilardi and Feldman's articles call for clinical psychology to redefine itself according to a particular paradigm or "unifying framework." This commentary focuses on the nature of clinical psychology as an applied discipline, whether clinical psychology in fact has an urgent need for a unifying framework, and whether radical behaviorism or cognitive neuroscience could provide such a framework. It is concluded that, as an applied field that draws both theory and method from a number of natural and social sciences, clinical psychology is served best by continued development and appropriation of competing scientific viewpoints rather than by fealty to a single perspective or paradigm.