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. 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". In many of its uses, "the meaning of guessing is assumed as implicitly understood", 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, who may have a "gut feeling" about which answer is correct without necessarily being able to articulate a reason for having this feeling.
Gradations
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. This reflects the observation made centuries before by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, that "when I turn one way rather than another, it is often because of a series of tiny impressions of which I am not aware". 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". A guess that "is merely a hunch or is groundless... is arbitrary and of little consequence epistemologically". A guess made with no factual basis for its correctness may be called a wild guess. Jonathan Baron has said that "[t]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 from choosing an answer at random. Philosopher David Stove described this process as follows:
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