Retroduction

Retroduction is the mode of inference that makes it possible to investigate unobservable mechanisms. Rather than moving from causes to predicted effects, it works backward — from observed effects to the conditions that must exist for those effects to be possible.

In critical realist research, investigation moves from empirical patterns, through actual events, to the real mechanisms that generated them, asking: what must exist for these documented phenomena to be possible? This is what lets social research study structures and mechanisms it cannot observe directly, through their manifestations.

Discussed in chapter-03 §III.ii.

Further reading: Critical realism (Wikipedia)