Guessing

A guess (or an act of guessing) is a swift conclusion drawn from data directly at hand, and held as probable or tentative, while the person making the guess (the guesser) admittedly lacks material for a greater degree of certainty.

Quotes

• I never guess. It is a shocking habit — destructive to the logical faculty.
  • Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of the Four (1890)

• Let us suppose that an ichthyologist is exploring the life of the ocean. He casts a net into the water and brings up a fishy assortment. Surveying his catch, he proceeds in the usual manner of a scientist to systematise what it reveals. He arrives at two generalisations: No sea-creature is less than two inches long. (2) All sea-creatures have gills. These are both true of his catch, and he assumes tentatively that they will remain true however often he repeats it.
  In applying this analogy, the catch stands for the body of knowledge which constitutes physical science, and the net for the sensory and intellectual equipment which we use in obtaining it. The casting of the net corresponds to observation; for knowledge which has not been or could not be obtained by observation is not admitted into physical science.
  An onlooker may object that the first generalisation is wrong. "There are plenty of sea-creatures under two inches long, only your net is not adapted to catch them." The icthyologist dismisses this objection contemptuously. "Anything uncatchable by my net is ipso facto outside the scope of icthyological knowledge. In short, "what my net can't catch isn't fish." Or — to translate the analogy — "If you are not simply guessing, you are claiming a knowledge of the physical universe discovered in some other way than by the methods of physical science, and admittedly unverifiable by such methods. You are a metaphysician. Bah!"
  • Arthur Eddington, The Philosophy of Physical Science (1938), p. 16.

• Sometimes we make guesses because we wish, with our limited knowledge, to say as much as we can about some situation. Really, any generalization is in the nature of a guess. Any physical theory is a kind of guesswork. There are good guesses and there are bad guesses. The theory of probability is a system for making better guesses. The language of probability allows us to speak quantitatively about some situation which may be highly variable, but which does have some consistent average behavior.
  • Richard Feynman: (1963). 6–1. Chance and likelihood in Chapter 6. Probability, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Volume I, Mainly Mechanics, Radiation, and Heat

• My guessing game is strong
  Way too real to be wrong
  • Lady Gaga, Kevin Parker, Mark Ronson and BloodPop, Perfect Illusion (September 9, 2016)

• The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it — this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education.
  • Henry James, The Art of Fiction (1884); originally published in Longman's Magazine (1884-09-04) and reprinted in Partial Portraits (1888).

• There is no effective difference between guessing a variable that is not random, but for which information is partial or deficient (...), and a random one (...). In this sense, guessing (what I don't know, but what someone else may know) and predicting (what has not taken place yet) are the same thing.
  • Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. 142.

• The golden guess
  Is morning-star to the full round of truth.
  • Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Columbus, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

• All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don't know by what you do; that's what I called "guessing what was at the other side of the hill."
  • Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, statement in conversation with John Crocker and Crocker's wife (4 September 1852), as quoted in The Croker Papers: The Correspondence and Diaries of the Late Right Honourable John Wilson Croker, LL.Dm F.R.S, Secretary of the Admiralty from 1809 to 1830 (1884), edited by Louis J. Jennings, Vol.III, p. 276.