Inference

Inference is the act or process of drawing a conclusion based solely on what one already knows. Suppose you see rain on your window - you can infer from that, quite trivially, that the sky is grey. Looking out the window would have yielded the same fact, but through a process of perception, not inference (note however that perception itself can be viewed as an inferential process).

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Inference is studied within several different fields. Human inference (i.e. how humans draw conclusions) is traditionally studied within the field of cognitive psychology. The rules and process of inference are some of philosophy's oldest subject matters. Logic studies the laws of valid inference. Statisticians have developed formal rules for inference from quantitative data. Artificial intelligence researchers develop automated inference systems.

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Conclusion: :For the Conflict album, see Conclusion (album)....

Perception: In psychology and the cognitive sciences, perception is the process of acquiring, interpreting, selecting, and organizing sensory information. Methods of studying perception range from essentially biological or physiological approaches, through psychological approaches to the often abstract 'thought...

Cognitive psychology: Cognitive psychology is the psychological science which studies cognition, the mental processes that are hypothesised to underlie behavior. This covers a broad range of research domains, examining questions about the workings of memory, attention, perception, knowledge representation, reasoning, cre...