TFY, Ch. 4 summary- Inference: What follows?

When a person infers, they are: imaging, guessing, predicting, and concluding. Inferences are often confused with facts. Inferences help fill in when facts are missing, or they can help make sense of facts already presented. Inferences should always be checked against the facts for accuracy and to make sure you are not inferring incorrectly. Most problems are solved by, asking questions, gathering facts, and making inferences. “Inferences are essential to mental operations in the search for knowledge.” This statement is very true in my opinion. All the facts are not always presented to the reader or problem solver. They have to be able to infer with skill to put the pieces together and see the entire picture. Generalizations are laws in science that are based on observations that deal with recurrence, order, and relationships. Experience is necessary in information gathering to make accurate generalizations. A topic sentence is a writer’s generalized statement. It usually opens up a paragraph. Facts and inferences follow in order to support their main idea. Knowledge is found when inferences are used with skill. When inferences are used carelessly and without awareness it could lead to confusion and miss leading information.