On Inferences

On Inferences

Broadly defining inference as any cognitive attempt to add to the information available in a stimulus situation, so as to improve its meaningfulness, this article examines everyday-life inferences. Such inferences are found to be ubiquitous in all phases of our experience, occurring in a great variety of forms. Although inferences are thus not confined to logic and linguistics, where they have been most intensively studied, they have been largely neglected as direct objects of theoretical and experimental study. A number of direct studies of inferences in my own laboratory are described, and it is concluded that such direct study of inferences is important not only for its own sake but also for the light . that it may throw on problems of implicit cognition, such as intuition.