.

Types of Inference

There are two basic types of inference:

a. Deduction (or “deductive inference”) is an inference based on logical certainty. It usually starts from a
general principle and then infers something about specific cases.

“Grapes are poisonous to all dogs”

This allows you to infer that grapes are poisonous for your dog, too. If the premise is true then the
conclusion has to be true. There’s no other possibility. Notice, however, that this doesn’t really tell you
anything new: once you say “grapes are poisonous to all dogs,” you

already know that grapes are poisonous for your specific dog. Deduction has the advantage of certainty,
but it doesn’t generate new knowledge .

b. Induction (or “inductive inference”) is an inference based on probability. It usually starts from specific
information and then infers the more general principle.

“For the last two years, Amanda has woken up at 8am every day”

This allows you to infer that Amanda will probably wake up at 8am tomorrow, too. You would probably
be right, and it’s a reasonable inference but it’s not certain! Tomorrow could be the first day that
Amanda decides to sleep in. Despite this uncertainty, however, induction does offer the possibility of
predicting future events and creating new knowledge.

III. Inference vs. Observation

An inference starts from a premise (like a piece of evidence) and then moves beyond it. But what about
when you just

see the evidence for yourself? Do you need to make any inferences then?

It might seem like inference and observation are two very different processes — related, of course, but
very different. But in fact it’s not so easy to separate them.

Example

“I saw Marco walk into the grocery store the other day.”

This is a direct observation. It doesn’t seem to involve any inferences. But if you look with a careful,
skeptical eye, you’ll see that it contains many inferences — what did you really see?

“I saw someone who looked like Marco walk into the grocery store the other day.”

It’s entirely possible that you made a mistake! It’s easy to mistake people on the street for people you
know, so you can’t be entirely sure that you saw what you think you saw. The person could even have
been a robot. Or you could have hallucinated the whole thing!
Of course, this is not the sort of thing you really need to worry about — 99% of the time, you’re correct
about what you’re seeing. The point is just that observations are never 100% reliable, and always involve
a certain amount of inference.

This may sound like abstract quibbling — after all, we rely on our senses in everyday life and usually it
works out fine. Shouldn’t that be good enough for philosophical arguments?

There’s a famous story in philosophy that starts out that way:

A great philosopher was speaking to a room full of his colleagues, trying to get them to bring their heads
out of the clouds and realize that observation is reliable enough for most practical purposes. To illustrate
his point, he looked above him and said “Look, I see the window above me! I see the panes of glass, and
I see blue sky through them! There’s no need for me to be skeptical about things that I can see with my
own eyes!”

But in fact, the window was a highly realistic painting.

The point is, don’t be overconfident in direct observation — your senses are not always reliable, and
even when you think

you’re making a direct observation, you’re really making inferences, which may or may not be correct.

Inferences are steps in reasoning , moving from

premises to logical consequences; etymologically, the word infer means to "carry forward". Inference is
theoretically traditionally divided into deduction and induction , a distinction that in Europe dates at
least to

Aristotle (300s BCE). Deduction is inference

deriving logical conclusions from premises known or assumed to be true , with the laws of valid
inference being studied in logic . Induction is inference from particular premises to a

universal conclusion. A third type of inference is sometimes distinguished, notably by Charles Sanders
Peirce, distinguishing abduction from induction, where abduction is inference to the best explanation.

Various fields study how inference is done in practice. Human inference (i.e. how humans draw
conclusions) is traditionally studied within the field of cognitive psychology; artificial intelligence
researchers develop automated inference systems to emulate human inference.

Statistical inference uses mathematics to draw conclusions in the presence of uncertainty.This

generalizes deterministic reasoning, with the absence of uncertainty as a special case. Statistical
inference uses quantitative or qualitative (categorical) data which may be subject to random variations.