Top 83 Inference Quotes
#1. While no inference is intended here, it is worth noting, in connection with Milton Friedman's comment that "Kelso just turned Marx upside down," that it is not necessarily amiss to turn a fellow upside down if that in fact straightens out his thinking.
Louis O. Kelso
#2. I have stressed this distinction because it is an important one. It defines the fundamental difference between probability and statistics: the former concerns predictions based on fixed probabilities; the latter concerns the inference of those probabilities based on observed data.
Leonard Mlodinow
#3. She said, Promise me that you will not tell me anything of the plans formed for the campaign against the Count. Not by word, or inference, or implication, not at any time whilst this remains to me!
Bram Stoker
#4. 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
#5. The Vicar's talk was not always inspiriting: he had escaped being a Pharisee, but he had not escaped that low estimate of possibilities which we rather hastily arrive at as an inference from our own failure.
George Eliot
#6. We can scarcely avoid the inference that light consists in the transverse undulations of the same medium which is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena.
James Clerk Maxwell
#7. This fact immediately suggested a singular event - that at some time in the distant past the universe began expanding from an extremely small size. To many people this inference was loaded with overtones of a supernatural event - the creation, the beginning of the universe.
Michael Behe
#8. The ocean is the last frontier of human empirical knowledge; even the contours on that eighth-grader's globe are the product of a mix of scientific measurement, inference and conjecture.
Alan Huffman
#9. We may take it to be the accepted idea that the Mosaic books were not handed down to us for our instruction in scientific knowledge, and that it is our duty to ground our scientific beliefs upon observation and inference, unmixed with considerations of a different order.
Asa Gray
#10. Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information.
Stephen Jay Gould
#11. If there isn't a natural explanation and there doesn't seem to be the potential of finding one, then I believe it's appropriate to look at a supernatural explanation. I think that's the most reasonable inference based on the evidence.
Walter L. Bradley
#12. Inference is always an invasion of the unknown, a leap from the known.
John Dewey
#13. I am guilty of believing that the human race can be humanized and enriched in every spiritual inference through the saner and more beneficent processes of peaceful persuasion applied to material problems rather than through wars, riots and bloodshed.
Eugene V. Debs
#14. 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.
Edward Abbey
#15. Logic is justly considered the basis of all other sciences, even if only for the reason that in every argument we employ concepts taken from the field of logic, and that ever correct inference proceeds in accordance with its laws.
Alfred Tarski
#16. In the absence of any general inference from 'A is a potential X' to 'A has the rights of an X', we should not accept that a potential person should have the rights of a person, unless we can be given some specific reason why this should hold in this particular case.
Peter Singer
#17. Instantaneous interpretation hails from the Limbo that produced unsensed sensibilia, unconscious inference, incorrigible statements, negative facts and Objektive. These are ideas which philosophers force on the world to preserve some pet epistemological or metaphysical theory.
Norwood Russell Hanson
#18. When we write stories that are happy, with little conflict or inference of sin, then we are creating portraits of the world that perpetuate a sort of "soft universalism," the idea that no one is truly lost but rather that all are actually saved.
Gene C. Fant Jr.
#19. 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
#20. A universe whose only claim to be believed in rests on the validity of inference must not start telling us the inference is invalid.
C.S. Lewis
#21. Second, I use inference from technical studies and theories in order to provide practical information for therapists. Those thoughts are several steps removed from scientific validity.
Virgil Miller Newton
#22. An inference of perspective,
a glimpse of regularity,
causation of habit,
and the only recurrence:
my faith in you.
Camilo Garzon
#23. A Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to against every government, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.
Thomas Jefferson
#24. Inductive inference is the only process known to us by which essentially new knowledge comes into the world.
Ronald Fisher
#25. You put three facts together - that all organisms produce more offspring that can survive, that there's variation among organisms, and that at least some of that variation is inherited - and the syllogistic inference is natural selection.
Stephen Jay Gould
#26. How conscience tells us that we ought to be fair, nobody knows. This we can say: we don't know it just from being told, we don't know it from the five senses, and we don't know it by inference from prior knowledge. We just know it. The knowledge is underived.
J. Budziszewski
#27. The determinism of the physical laws simply reflects the determinism of the method of inference. This soulless nature of the scientific world need not worry those who are persuaded that the main significances of our environment are of a more spiritual character.
Arthur Stanley Eddington
#28. The inference to which we are brought is that the causes of faction cannot be removed and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects.
James Madison
#29. As they were walked closer, Kip saw that his inference was correct: every single person here was a drafter. There had to be eight hundred or a thousand drafters here! "Orholam," Karris breathed. "There must be five hundred drafters here." So I can't count, so what?
Brent Weeks
#30. 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
#31. It is a false principle that because we are entirely occupied with ourselves, we must equally occupy the thoughts of others. The contrary inference is the fair one.
William Hazlitt
#32. Rules and particular inferences alike are justified by being brought into agreement with each other. A rule is amended if it yields an inference we are unwilling to accept; an inference is rejected if it violates a rule we are unwilling to amend.
Nelson Goodman
#34. The regulative principle may therefore be seen, in a particular sense, as a natural inference from the doctrine of total depravity.
Joseph C. Morecraft III
#35. Haldane was engaged in discussion with an eminent theologian. "What inference," asked the latter, "might one draw about the nature of God from a study of his works?" Haldane replied: "An inordinate fondness for beetles."
John B. S. Haldane
#36. I think we have reached a level in society - with Helen Mirren playing The Queen - when we're not surprised any more. We don't mention names. Yes, it's obvious by inference. But we don't mention names and the film is not up to point fingers at Royalty.
David Suchet
#37. 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
#38. 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.
Laurence Sterne
#39. to know that an inference is deductively valid is to know that there are no situations in which the premisses are true and the conclusion is not.
Graham Priest
#40. 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.
Bill Nye
#41. If he's - the inference is that somehow he thinks slavery is a - is a noble institution I would - I would strongly reject that assumption - that John Ashcroft is a openminded, inclusive person.
George W. Bush
#42. The idea of a universal mind or Logos would be, I think, a fairly plausible inference from the present state of scientific theory.
Arthur Eddington
#43. Intelligent thinking means an increment of freedom in action-an emancipation from chance and fatality. 'Thought' represents the suggestion of a way of response that is different from that which would have been followed if intelligent observation had not effected an inference as to the future.
John Dewey
#44. People who have given us their complete confidence believe that they have a right to ours. The inference is false, a gift confers no rights.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#45. To most people God is an inference, not a reality. He is a deduction from evidence which they consider adequate; but He remains personally unknown to the individual.
A.W. Tozer
#46. It has been observed
that one's nose is never so happy as when thrust into the affairs of
others from which some physiologists have drawn the inference that
the nose is devoid of the sense of smell.
Ambrose Bierce
#47. The conjuror or con man is a very good provider of information. He supplies lots of data, by inference or direct statement, but it's false data. Scientists aren't used to that scenario. An electron or a galaxy is not capricious, nor deceptive; but a human can be either or both.
James Randi
#48. In order to avoid believing in just one God we are now asked to believe in an infinite number of universes, all of them unobservable just because they are not part of ours. The principle of inference seems to be not Occam's Razor but Occam's Beard: Multiply entities unnecessarily.
J. Budziszewski
#49. Even after the observation of the frequent conjunction of objects, we have no reason to draw any inference concerning any object beyond those of which we have had experience.
David Hume
#50. A problem of statistical inference or, more simply, a statistics problem is a problem in which data that have been generated in accordance with some unknown probability distribution must be analyzed and some type of inference about the unknown distribution must be made.
Morris H. DeGroot
#51. 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.
Nicholas Murray Butler
#52. 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 Godel
#53. Truths are known to us in two ways: some are known directly, and of themselves; some through the medium of other truths. The former are the subject of Intuition, or Consciousness; 4 the latter, of Inference.
John Stuart Mill
#54. The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.
George Eliot
#55. Beyond the constant conjunction of similar objects, and the consequent inference from one to the other, we have no notion of any necessity, or connexion.
David Hume
#56. The classic experiment I describe next shows that people will not draw from base-rate information an inference that conflicts with other beliefs. It also supports the uncomfortable conclusion that teaching psychology is mostly a waste of time.
Daniel Kahneman
#57. To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologise unreservedly.
James D. Watson
#58. Econometrics may be defined as the quantitative analysis of actual economic phenomena based on the concurrent development of theory and observation, related by appropriate methods of inference.
Paul Samuelson
#59. We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.
Richard M. Nixon
#60. 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!
Philip K. Dick
#61. 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?
Plato
#62. All science is intelligent inference; excessive literalism is delusion, not a humble bowing to evidence.
Stephen Jay Gould
#64. All but a few of the organizations do not specifically promise to deliver superior investment performance although it is perhaps not unreasonable for the public to draw such an inference from their advertised emphasis on professional management.
Warren Buffett
#65. I had always been told by my parents, not implicitly told, but every inference was that Britain was the hub of the universe.
Rolf Harris
#66. Karma is a Sanskrit word meaning "action." It denotes an active force, the inference being that the outcome of future events can be influenced by our actions. To suppose that karma is some sort of independent energy which predestines the course of our whole life is simply incorrect.
Dalai Lama XIV
#68. There is no reasoning, no process of inference or comparison; there is no thinking about things, no putting two and two together; there are no ideas - the animal does not think of the box or of the food or of the act he is to perform.
Edward Thorndike
#69. The death rate is a fact; anything beyond this is an inference.
William Farr
#70. I shouldn't want you to be surprised, or to draw any particular inference from my making speeches, or not making speeches, out there. I don't recall any candidate for President that ever injured himself very much by not talking.
Calvin Coolidge
#71. Validity is the touchstone of inference, and truth of judgment: the fact that vichyssoise is cold ratifies the judgment that vichyssoise is, indeed, cold, and the judgment that vichyssoise is cold expresses the fact that vichyssoise is cold.
David Berlinski
#72. The practical utility of Formal Logic to-day lies not so much in the establishment of positive conclusions as in the prompt detection and exposure of invalid inference.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#73. The theory that the man who raises corn does a more important piece of work than the woman who makes it into bread is absurd. The inference is that the men alone render useful service. But neither man nor woman eats these things until the woman has prepared it.
Ida Tarbell
#74. The statistician cannot excuse himself from the duty of getting his head clear on the principles of scientific inference, but equally no other thinking man can avoid a like obligation.
Ronald Fisher
#75. A dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters a desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic. And
George Eliot
#76. Shadwell hated all southerners and, by inference, was standing at the North Pole.
Terry Pratchett
#77. Statistical inference is really just the marriage of two concepts that we've already discussed: data and probability (with a little help from the central limit theorem).
Charles Wheelan
#78. Women never reason, or, if they do, they either draw correct inferences from wrong premises, or wrong inferences from correct premises; and they always poke the fire from the top.
Richard Whately
#79. All inferences from experience ... are effects of custom, not of reasoning.
David Hume
#80. It's frightening to think that you might not know something, but more frightening to think that, by and large, the world is run by people who have faith that they know exactly what is going on.
Amos Tversky
#81. An observation, strictly, is only a sensation. Nobody means that we should reject everything but sensations. But as soon as we go beyond sensations we are making inferences.
Harold Jeffreys
#82. Knowledge about limitations of your data collection process affects what inferences you can draw from the data.
Nick Bostrom
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