Quotes About Inference

Science is a set of methods designed to describe and interpret observed or inferred phenomenon, past or present, and aimed at building a testable body of knowledge open to rejection or confirmation.

A mere inference or theory must give way to a truth revealed; but a scientific truth must be maintained, however contradictory it may appear to the most cherished doctrines of religion.

There can be no doubt that the knowledge of logic is of considerable practical importance for everyone who desires to think and to infer correctly.

Knowledge about limitations of your data collection process affects what inferences you can draw from the data.

This desire of knowledge and the wonder which it hopes to satisfy are the driving power behind all the changes that we, with careless, question-begging inference, call progress.

Inductive inference is the only process known to us by which essentially new knowledge comes into the world.

Whatever we know without inference is mental.

The strength of a theory is not what it allows, but what it prohibits; if you can invent an equally persuasive explanation for any outcome, you have zero knowledge.

A presumption of any fact is, properly, an inferring of that fact from other facts that are known; it is an act of reasoning; and much of human knowledge on all subjects is derived from this source.

Probability fractions arise from our knowledge and from our ignorance.

Through logic and inference we can prove anything. Therefore, logic and inference, in contrast to ordinary daily living experience, are secondary instruments of knowledge. Probably tertiary.

The greatest progress that the human race has made lies in learning how to make correct inferences.

A too explicit elucidation in education destroys much of the pleasure of learning. There should be room for sly hinters, masters of suggestion.

I don't need your permission to search your locker." The headmaster's tone drew my attention back in his direction. This, I inferred from the rise in volume, was supposed to be the voice of authority. If you didn't need my permission, I thought, then why did you ask for it?

These inferences are invalid: "I am richer than you, therefore I am better than you," and "I am more eloquent than you, therefore I am better than you." But the following inferences are more cogent: "I am richer than you, therefore my property is better than yours," or "I am more eloquent than you, therefore my diction is better than yours." But you yourself are neither property nor diction.

We may therefore infer—" he writes, "improbable as is the inference—that worms are able by some means to judge which is the best end by which to draw triangles of paper into their burrows.

The difference between "significant" and "not significant" is not itself statistically significant

Don't leave inferences to be drawn when evidence can be presented.

Tax dollars intended for science education must not be used to teach creationism as any sort of real explanation of nature, because any observation or process of inference about our origin and the nature of the universe disproves creationism in every respect.

According to Korzybski, differentiating orders of abstraction also included distinguishing between (a) descriptions of experiences and (b) inferences (conclusions drawn from our experiences and our descriptions of those experiences); and between descriptions about descriptions, inferences based upon other inferences, affect about affect (feelings about other feelings), and between one person's abstractions and another person's abstractions, etc.

Drop a word in the ocean of meaning and concentric ripples form. To define a single word means to try to catch those ripples. No one's hands are fast enough.

Our natural way of thinking, of making judgments, of identifying causal connections is to jump to conclusions on flimsy evidence.

I realized that I would wind up like him if I hung around him much longer.

Cursed luck! —said he, biting his lip as he shut the door, —for man to be master of one of the finest chains of reasoning in nature, —and have a wife at the same time with such a head-piece, that he cannot hang up a single inference within side of it, to save his soul from destruction.