Guessing is the act of drawing a swift conclusion, called a guess, from data directly at hand, which is then held as probable or tentative, while the person making the guess (the guesser) admittedly lacks material for a greater degree of certainty.[1] A guess is 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".[2] In many of its uses, "the meaning of guessing is assumed as implicitly understood",[3] 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 given options. Guessing may also involve the intuition of the guesser,[4] who may have a "gut feeling" about which answer is correct without necessarily being able to articulate a reason for having this feeling.
- ^ James Champlin Fernald, English Synonyms and Antonyms (1914), p. 287.
- ^ David M. Kaplan, Ricoeur's Critical Theory (2003), p. 68.
- ^ Mark Tschaepe, "Gradations of Guessing: Preliminary Sketches and Suggestions", in John R. Shook, Contemporary Pragmatism Volume 10, Number 2, (December 2013), p. 135-154.
- ^ Sandra E. Hockenbury, Susan A. Nolan, Don H. Hockenbury, Psychology (2015), p. 279.