Quotes About Inference

How could an argument soothe or settle a controversy when every word is a nest for a bird of doubt? (meaning of words as inferences)

Geometry is the art of correct reasoning from incorrectly drawn figures.

guess I can put two and two together." "Sometimes the answer's four," I said, "and sometimes it's twenty-two.

Jumping to Conclusions. This is where you jump to painful and upsetting conclusions that aren't really supported by the facts. There are two common versions of this distortion:

As there is only a logical necessity, so there is only a logical impossibility.

Indeed, proof that a given condition always precedes or accompanies a phenomenon does not warrant concluding with certainty that a given condition is the immediate cause of that phenomenon. It must still be established that when this condition is removed, the phenomen will no longer appear.

It seems a fair inference (I have heard even anti-Zionist Israeli liberals implying it) that terrorizing the Palestinian population into flight was a deliberate policy.

Nothing favourable comes from speculation.

But that the reasoning from these facts, the drawing from them correct conclusions, is a matter of great difficulty, may be inferred from the imperfect state in which the Science is now found after it has been so long and so intensely studied.

In a different direction, the necessity to model the analysis of noisy incomplete sensory data not by logic but by Bayesian inference first came to the forefront in the robotics community with their use of Kalman filters.

If it is justifiable to assume that other human beings feel pain as we do, is there any reason why similar inference should be unjustifiable in the case of other animals?

It's—it's a variable." Kaplan was shaking, white-lipped and pale. "Something from which no inference can be made. The man from the past. The machines can't deal with him. The variable man!

Like an existentialist, I will infer my state from the actions I perform. Thought follows deed, as Mussolini taught. In Anfang war die Tat, as Goethe says in Faust. In the beginning was the deed, not the word.

Since pain is a totally subjective mental experience, we do not have direct access to anyone or anything's pain but our own; and even just the principles by which we can infer that others experience pain and have a legitimate interest in not feeling pain involve hard-core philosophy—metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, ethics.

The right question is: where is the meaning in life? Meaning is a man-made concept. It's something we infer from those experiences that are self-evidently good, and stem from a feeling of joy and wonder. Meaning is not something that occurs in the future. It exists in the here and now, within the fact that our lives are finite. F

En realidad, una de las grandes fortalezas de la ciencia es la habilidad para inferir cosas que no podemos observar directamente a partir de las que sí podemos.

Conclusions were necessary and she had come up with them.

The death rate is a fact; anything beyond this is an inference.

Then, if women are to have the same duties as men, they must have the same nurture and education? Yes. The education which was assigned to the men was music and gymnastic. Yes. Then women must be taught music and gymnastic and also the art of war, which they must practise like the men? That is the inference, I suppose. I

Then, when the rhetorician is more persuasive than the physician, the ignorant is more persuasive with the ignorant than he who has knowledge?—is not that the inference?

Very often the reason that people reach faulty conclusions is not their inability to reason; it is that they reason from faulty premises.

I thought I had not been out for long; I showed no symptoms of concussion or other ill effects from the blow, save a sore patch on the base of my skull. My captor, a man of few words, had responded to my questions, demands and acerbic remarks alike with the all-purpose Scottish noise which can best be rendered phonetically as Mmmmphm. Had I been in any doubt as to him nationality, that sound alone would have been sufficient to remove it.

People are going to assume whatever they want to assume.

A lot of people understand what not saying anything means, so, in effect, not saying anything is really saying a lot.