Quotes About Conjectures

While an uncritical animal may be eliminated altogether with its dogmatically held hypotheses, we may formulate our hypotheses, and criticize them. Let our conjectures, our theories die in our stead!

If anyone offers conjectures about the truth of things from the mere possibility of hypotheses, I do not see by what stipulation anything certain can be determined in any science, since one or another set of hypotheses may always be devised which will appear to supply new difficulties.

The lives of strangers have their own rules, which differ from case to case, and anyone who tries to deduce them from a chance meeting is bound to get lost in an ocean of conjectures.

Popper introduced the mechanism of conjectures and refutations, which works as follows: you formulate a (bold) conjecture and you start looking for the observation that would prove you wrong. This is the alternative to our search for confirmatory instances. If you think the task is easy, you will be disappointed—few humans have a natural ability to do this. I confess that I am not one of them; it does not come naturally to me.fn2

Most biblicists carry on with unperturbed confidence in biblicist assumptions and beliefs, paying little attention to the ramifications of multiple counterclaims about rival biblical teachings. Why and how can this be? The answers are multiple, and I can offer only conjectures about some of the possibilities here.

In politics a capable ruler must be guided by circumstances, conjectures and conjunctions.

In the discovery of secret things and in the investigation of hidden causes, stronger reasons are obtained from sure experiments and demonstrated arguments than from probable conjectures and the opinions of philosophical speculators of the common sort.

Wide are men's inquiries into uncertainties; wider still are their disputes about conjectures.

Shakespeare is getting flyblown; a paternal government might well forbid writing about him, as they put his monument at Stratford beyond the reach of scribbling fingers. With all this buzz of criticism about, one may hazard one's conjectures privately, make one's notes in the margin; but, knowing that someone has said it before, or said it better, the zest is gone. Illness, it its kingly sublimity, sweeps all that aside and leaves nothing but Shakespeare and oneself.

It may be easily believed that however little of novelty could be added to their fears hopes and conjectures on this interesting subject by its repeated discussion no other could detain them from it long during the whole of the journey. From Elizabeth's thoughts it was never absent. Fixed there by the keenest of all anguish self-reproach she could find no interval of ease or forgetfulness.

There are always so many conjectures as to the issue of any event that however it may end there will always be people to say: "I said then that it would be so," quite forgetting that amid their innumerable conjectures many were to quite the contrary effect.

However useful computer models may be, the one thing they cannot be is evidence. Computer climate models are simply conjectures.

Rumour is a pipe Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures And of so easy and so plain a stop That the blunt monster with uncounted heads, The still-discordant wavering multitude, Can play upon it.

He who receives Light from above, from the Fountain of Light, No other doctrine needs, though granted true; But these are false, or little else but dreams, Conjectures, fancies, built on nothing firm.

Far from creating a new formalism, what these can yield is something far transcending surface values since they not only embody form as beauty, but also form in which intuitions or ideas or conjectures have taken visible substance.

Oh, I beg your pardon; I do not know—" he stammered. "What to make of me," interrupted the other. "You would therefore do well to believe just what I tell you, or at least to avoid making conjectures of your own, which will lead to nothing.