Sherlock Holmes, the fictional sleuth who famously resides on Baker Street, is known for his impressive powers of logical reasoning. With a quick visual sweep of a crime scene, he generates hypotheses ...

Hume himself does not use the word "induction". But what has come to be called "the problem of induction" comes down to us from him. What follows is not a detailed analysis of Hume's text. I will ...

IN a paper read before the Royal Statistical Society on December 18, Prof. R. A. Fisher surveyed the recent change in the outlook of mathematical statisticians. The most profound modification seems to ...

One of the hallmarks of human learning is our ability to make inductive inferences using only a small set of data. An example of this ability given by researchers that authored a recent PNAS ...

If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment. ~ Ernest Rutherford Many psychology students (and readers of Psychology Today) hate statistics, p < .05. During my ...

We all have the habit of trying to guess the killer in a movie before the big reveal. That’s us making inferences. It’s what happens when your brain connects the dots without being told everything ...

All people are mortal. Socrates is a person. Therefore: Socrates is mortal. This is the classic example of the West’s preferred form of reasoning— deductive logic. We have long professed to prefer it ...