Inference Quotes - Page 4

Any approach to scientific inference which seeks to legitimize it and answer in reponse to complex uncertainty is, for me, a totalitarian parody of a would-be rational learning process.

Adrian Smith

Learning, Would Be, Answers

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...a consistency proof for [any] system ... can be carried out only by means of modes of inference that are not formalized in the system ... itself.

Kurt Gödel

Mean, Math, Consistency

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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)

Edmond Jabes

Bird, Doubt, Nests

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No deliberation made by a single person will be successful; the nature of the work which a sovereign has to do is to be inferred from the consideration of both the visible and invisible causes. The clearance of doubts as to whatever is susceptible of two opinions, and the inference of the whole when only a part is seen is possible of decision only by ministers. Hence the king shall sit at deliberation with persons of wide intellect.

Chanakya

Kings, Successful, Two

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Leibniz endeavored to provide an account of inference and judgment involving the mechanical play of symbols and very little else. The checklists that result are the first of humanity's intellectual artifacts. They express, they explain, and so they ratify a power of the mind. And, of course, they are artifacts in the process of becoming algorithms.

David Berlinski

Play, Humanity, Intellectual

David Berlinski (2000). “The Advent of the Algorithm: The Idea that Rules the World”, Houghton Mifflin

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Whatever we know without inference is mental.

Bertrand Russell

Knowledge, Knows

Bertrand Russell (2013). “Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Value”, p.240, Routledge

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It is difficult to distinguish deduction from what in other circumstances is called problem-solving. And concept learning, inference, and reasoning by analogy are all instances of inductive reasoning. (Detectives typically induce, rather than deduce.) None of these things can be done separately from each other, or from anything else. They are pseudo-categories.

Frank Smith

Detectives, Pseudo, Done

Frank Smith (2014). “To Think: In Language, Learning and Education”, p.25, Routledge

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The very foundation of our science is only an inference; far the whole of it rests an the unprovable assumption that, all through the inferred lapse of time which the inferred performance of inferred geological processes involves, they have been going on in a manner consistent with the laws of nature as we know them now.

William Morris Davis

Law, Lapses, Foundation

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Not only does the psyche exist, but it is existence itself. It is an almost absurd prejudice to suppose that existence can only be physical...We might well say, on the contrary, that physical existence is a mere inference, since we know of matter only in so far as we perceive psychic images mediated by the senses.

Carl Jung

Psychics, Doe, Prejudice

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Some changes of language are to be regretted, as they lead to false inferences, and society is always a loser by mistaking names for things.

James F. Cooper

Names, Loser, Language

"The American Democrat: Or, Hints on the Social and Civic Relations of the United States of America". Book by James F. Cooper, 1838.

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The basic formulation, or bare-bones mechanics, of natural selection is a disarmingly simple argument, based on three undeniable facts (overproduction of offspring, variation, and heritability) and one syllogistic inference (natural selection, or the claim that organisms enjoying differential reproductive success will, on average, be those variants that are fortuitously better adapted to changing local environments, and that these variants will then pass their favored traits to offspring by inheritance).

Stephen Jay Gould

Simple, Average, Atheism

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With all this talk about the supposed strain in relations [with the Soviet Union], there is an inference that somehow it is our fault. But we didn't kill Russian civilians by shooting down a civilian airplane. We didn't attempt to conquer an adjacent country to ours. We didn't walk out on negotiations and refuse to give a date for when we would resume.

Ronald Reagan

Country, War, Airplane

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A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man's mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises.

Michael Chabon

Men, Light, Mind

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In all aspects of life... we define our reality in terms of metaphors and then proceed to act on the basis of the metaphors. We draw inferences, set goals, make commitments, and execute plans, all on the basis of how we in part structure our experience, consciously and unconsciously, by means of metaphor.

George Lakoff

Mean, Commitment, Reality

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When I was twelve years old I thought up an odd trinity: namely, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Devil. My inference wasthat God, in contemplating himself, created the second person of the godhead; but that, in order to be able to contemplate himself, he had to contemplate, and thus to create, his opposite.--With this I began to do philosophy.

Friedrich Nietzsche

God, Father, Philosophy

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The inference is, that God has restated the superiority of the West. God always does like that when a thousand white people surround one dark one. Dark people are always "bad" when they do not admit the Divine Plan like that. A certain Javanese man who sticks up for Indonesian Independence is very lowdown by the papers, and suspected of being a Japanese puppet.

Zora Neale Hurston

Dark, Men, White

Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker (1979). “I Love Myself when I Am Laughing ... and Then Again when I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader”, p.166, Feminist Press at CUNY

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We shall say that we have acquaintance with anything of which we are directly aware, without the intermediary of any process of inference of any knowledge of truths.

Bertrand Russell

Language, Process, Acquaintance

Bertrand Russell (2016). “The Problems of Philosophy”, p.60, Bertrand Russell

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At some time in the history of the universe, there were no human minds, and at some time later, there were. Within the blink of a cosmic eye, a universe in which all was chaos and void came to include hunches, beliefs, sentiments, raw sensations, pains, emotions, wishes, ideas, images, inferences, the feel of rubber, Schadenfreude, and the taste of banana ice cream.

David Berlinski

Pain, Eye, Ideas

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Each of us lives within the universe - the prison - of his own brain. Projecting from it are millions of fragile sensory nerve fibers, in groups uniquely adapted to sample the energetic states of the world around us: heat, light, force, and chemical composition. That is all we ever know of it directly; all else is logical inference.

Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle

Light, Brain, Nerves

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Singer and actress Gertrude Lawrence once overheard an assistant describing the beauty of a coat she knew she could never even dream of affording. Having ascertained the exact shop, coat and price, Ms. Lawrence returned from her lunch break wearing that coat, apparently in order to flaunt and emphasize her greater purchasing power and, by inference, her superior status.

Sheridan Morley

Dream, Order, Lunch Break

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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.

David Brewster

Truth, Giving, Doctrine

David Brewster (1854). “More Worlds Than One: The Creed of the Philosopher and the Hope of the Christian”, p.138

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In some small field each child should attain, within the limited range of its experience and observation, the power to draw a justly limited inference from observed facts.

Charles William Eliot

Children, Power, Fields

Charles William Eliot (1926). “Charles W. Eliot: The Man and His Beliefs”

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Let me run over the principal steps. We approached the case, you remember, with an absolutely blank mind, which is always an advantage. We had formed no theories. We were simply there to observe and to draw inferences from our observations.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Running, Blank Mind, Steps

Sherlock Holmes in "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box" (1893). In "The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter" (1893) Holmes tells Doctor Watson, "All things should be seen exactly as they are."

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Unfortunately, philosophers of science usually regard scientific realism and scientific anti-realism as monistic doctrines. The assumption is that there is one goal of all scientific inference - finding propositions that are true, or finding propositions that are predictively accurate. In fact, there are multiple goals. Sometimes realism is the right interpretation of a scientific problem, while at other times instrumentalism is.

Elliott Sober

Goal, Doctrine, Facts

Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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But Thee, but Thee, O sovereign Seer of time,
But Thee, O poets' Poet, Wisdom's Tongue,
But Thee, O man's best Man, O love's best Love,
O perfect life in perfect labor writ,
O all men's Comrade, Servant, King, or Priest, --
What IF or YET, what mole, what flaw, what lapse,
What least defect or shadow of defect,
What rumor, tattled by an enemy,
Of inference loose, what lack of grace
Even in torture's grasp, or sleep's, or death's --
Oh, what amiss may I forgive in Thee,
Jesus, good Paragon, Thou Crystal Christ?

Sidney Lanier

Best Love, Jesus, Kings

Sidney Lanier (1999). “Poems of Sidney Lanier”, p.32, University of Georgia Press

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