|
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.〔James Champlin Fernald, ''English Synonyms and Antonyms'' (1914), p. 287.〕 A guess is also an unstable answer, as it is "always putative, fallible, open to further revision and interpretation, and validated against the horizon of possible meanings by showing that one interpretation is more probable than another in light of what we already know".〔David M. Kaplan, ''Ricoeur's Critical Theory'' (2003), p. 68.〕 In many of its uses, "the meaning of guessing is assumed as implicitly understood",〔Mark Tschaepe, "Gradations of Guessing: Preliminary Sketches and Suggestions", in John R. Shook, ''Contemporary Pragmatism'' Volume 10, Number 2, (December 2013), p. 135-154.〕 and the term is therefore often used without being meticulously defined. Guessing may combine elements of deduction, induction, abduction, and the purely random selection of one choice from a set of options. Guessing may also involve the intuition of the guesser,〔Sandra E. Hockenbury, Susan A. Nolan, Don H. Hockenbury, ''Psychology'' (2015), p. 279.〕 who may have a "gut feeling" about which answer is correct without necessarily being able to articulate a reason for having this feeling. ==Gradations of guessing== Philosopher Mark Tschaepe, who has written extensively on the scientific and epistemological role of guessing, has noted that there are often-overlooked "gradations" of guessing - that is, different kinds of guesses susceptible to different levels of confidence. Tschaepe defines guessing as "an initial, deliberate originary activity of imaginatively creating, selecting, or dismissing potential solutions to problems or answers to questions as a volitional response to those problems or questions when insufficient information is available to make merely a deduction and/or induction to the solution or answer". He objects to definitions that describe guessing as either forming a "random or insufficiently formed opinion", which Tschaepe deems too ambiguous to be helpful, or "to instantaneously happen upon an opinion without reasoning". Tschaepe notes that in the latter case, the guess might appear to occur without reasoning, when in fact a reasoning process may be occurring so quickly in the mind of the guesser that it does not register as a process.〔 Tschaepe quotes the description given by William Whewell, who says that this process "goes on so rapidly that we cannot trace it in its successive steps".〔〔William Whewell, ''The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences: Founded Upon Their History'', Volume 2 (1840), p. 206-207.〕 A guess that "is merely a hunch or is groundless... is arbitrary and of little consequence epistemologically".〔Martin Schiralli, ''Constructive Postmodernism: Toward Renewal in Cultural and Literary Studies'' (1999), p. 67.〕 A guess made with no factual basis for its correctness may be called a wild guess. Jonathan Baron has said that "()he value of a wild guess is l/N + l/N - l/N = l/N", meaning that taking a true wild guess is no different than choosing an answer at random.〔Jonathan Baron, ''Rationality and Intelligence'' (2005), p. 146.〕 Philosopher David Stove described this process as follows: In such an instance, there not only is no reason for favoring "heads" or "tails", but everyone knows this to be the case. Tschaepe also addresses the guess made in a coin flip, contending that it merely represents an extremely limited case of guessing a random number. Tschaepe examines such guesses at greater length with the instance of guessing a number between 1 and 100, for which Tschaepe notes that the guesser "has to look for clues that are specific to what or whom is ordering them to guess, as well as possible past scenarios that involved guessing numbers", and once these are exhausted, "there comes a point very early in the process wherein no other clue to an answer exists".〔 As an exemplary case of guessing that involves progressively more information from which to make a further guess, Tschaepe notes the game of Twenty Questions, which Tschaepe says is "similar to guessing a number that the other person is thinking, but unlike guessing a number as a singular action... allows for combining abductive reasoning with deductive and inductive reasoning".〔 An apparently unreasoned guess that turns out to be correct may be called a happy guess,〔 or a lucky guess,〔Oliver Ibe, ''Fundamentals of Applied Probability and Random Processes'' (2014), p. 25, defining a lucky guess in the context of a person making random guesses as "among the questions whose answers she guessed at random".〕 and it has been argued that "a 'lucky guess' is a paradigm case of a belief that does not count as knowledge".〔Duncan Pritchard, Lee John Whittington, ''The Philosophy of Luck'' (2015), p. 186.〕 In Jane Austen's ''Emma'', however, the author has the character, Emma, respond to a character calling a match that she made a "lucky guess" by saying that "a lucky guess is never merely luck. There is always some talent in it".〔Jane Austen, ''Emma'' (1815), p. 8.〕 As Tschaepe notes, William Whewell stated that certain scientific discoveries "are not improperly described as happy Guesses; and that Guesses, in these as in other instances, imply various suppositions made, of which some one turns out to be the right one".〔 By contrast, a guess made using prior knowledge to eliminate clearly wrong possibilities may be called an informed guess or an educated guess. Uninformed guesses can be distinguished from the kind of informed guesses that lead to the development of a scientific hypothesis. Tschaepe notes that "()his process of guessing is distinct from that of a coin toss or picking a number".〔 It has also been noted that "()hen a decision must be made, the educated guess of the experts will be the best basis for a decision — an educated guess is better than an uneducated guess".〔Daniel E. Wueste, ''Professional Ethics and Social Responsibility'' (1994), p. 96.〕 An estimate is one kind of educated guess, although often one that involves making a numerical determination, and using some knowledge of known or observable variables to determine the most likely number or range of numbers. A guess, however, may also be purely a matter of selecting one possible answer from the set of possible answers, with little or no basis for making the selection. Another kind of guessing is conjecture, particularly as used in mathematics to refer to a conclusion or proposition which appears to be correct based on incomplete information, but for which no proof has been found. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Guessing」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|