Definition:
The process of deriving logical conclusions from premises known or assumed to be true. See also: Deduction.
Etymology:
From the Latin, "bring in"Examples and Observations:
- "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) - "[James] Watson, of course, shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for discovering, with the late Francis Crick, the double-helix structure of DNA, the master molecule of heredity. In his chronicle of that achievement, The Double Helix, Watson cast himself as the swashbuckling genius fighting his way to the top, climbing over anyone who got in his way (including Rosalind Franklin, who took the x-ray images that formed the basis for Watson and Crick's inference about DNA's structure but whom Watson and Crick failed to credit at the time)."
(Sharon Begley, "Watson Does it Again," Newsweek, October 18, 2007) - "Deduction is typically distinguished from induction by the fact that only for the former is the truth of an inference guaranteed by the truth of the premises on which it is based (given that all men are mortal and that Socrates is a man, we can deduce with complete certainty that Socrates is mortal). The fact that an inference is a valid deduction, however, is no guarantee that it is of the slightest interest. For example, if we know that snow is white, we are free to apply a standard rule of deductive inference to conclude that either 'snow is white or lions wear argyle socks.' In most realistic contexts such deductions will be as worthless as they are valid."
(John H. Holland, Keith J. Holyoak, Richard E. Nisbett, and Paul R. Thagard, Induction: Processes of Inference, Learning, and Discovery, MIT Press, 1996)
