All 33 Uses of

presume
in
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

The person who is counseling you not to do "just as you like" is making some remarkable presumptions as to what is likable.†
Part 3 *

presumptions = things thought of as true or likely, even though they are not known with certainty

For example, it seems completely natural to presume that gravitation and the law of gravitation existed before Isaac Newton.†
Part 1

But who was the old personality whom they had known and presumed I was a continuation of?†
Part 1

To state that would annihilate the most basic presumption of all science!†
Part 2

If you presume that the a priori concepts in our heads are independent of what we see and actually screen what we see, this means that you are taking the old Aristotelian concept of scientific man as a passive observer, a "blank tablet," and truly turning this concept inside out.†
Part 2

Once in a while they ask questions that seem to call for a statement of what the hell I'm always thinking about, but if I were to babble what's really on my mind about, say, the a priori presumption of the continuity of a motorcycle from second to second and do this without benefit of the entire edifice of the Chautauqua, they'd just be startled and wonder what's wrong.†
Part 2

Now I've some of the same feeling about DeWeese, who'll naturally presume I'm the person he once knew.†
Part 2

Holy wars are not fought over them because verbalized statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself.†
Part 2

Logic presumes a separation of subject from object; therefore logic is not final wisdom.†
Part 2

Science works with chunks and bits and pieces of things with the continuity presumed, and DeWeese works only with the continuities of things with the chunks and bits and pieces presumed.†
Part 2

Science works with chunks and bits and pieces of things with the continuity presumed, and DeWeese works only with the continuities of things with the chunks and bits and pieces presumed.†
Part 2

Technology presumes there's just one right way to do things and there never is.†
Part 2

And when you presume there's just one right way to do things, of course the instructions begin and end exclusively with the rotisserie.†
Part 2

So what Newton did was say, in effect, 'We're going to presume there's such a thing as instantaneous change, and see if we can find ways of determining what it is in various applications.'†
Part 2

The result of this presumption is the branch of mathematics known as the calculus, which every engineer uses today.†
Part 2

Subsequent lectures which presumed he'd completed the assignment might be a little more difficult to understand, however, and this difficulty, in turn, might weaken his interest to a point where the next assignment, which he would find quite hard, would also be dropped.†
Part 3

This is a tragedy, however, only if you presume that the cart of civilization, "the system," is pulled by mules.†
Part 3

The fact that they were there as students presumed they did not know what was good or bad.†
Part 3

If he was going to presume to be some super-scientist who could see in objects Quality that no scientist could detect, he was just proving himself to be a nut or a fool or both.†
Part 3

What was behind this smug presumption that what pleased you was bad, or at least unimportant in comparison to other things?†
Part 3

The Quality event is the cause of the subjects and objects, which are then mistakenly presumed to be the cause of the Quality!†
Part 3

The dilemma all the time had this unseen vile presumption in it, for which there was no logical justification.†
Part 3

They presumed that "preselected facts" meant that truth is "whatever you like" and called his ideas conventionalism.†
Part 3

And unless you're careful it's easy to make the presumption that's all the train there is.†
Part 3

It would tell you how to hold the blade when sharpening the knife, or how to use a sewing machine, or how to mix and apply glue with the presumption that once these underlying methods were applied, "good" would naturally follow.†
Part 3

I think that kind of approach starts it at the end and presumes the end is the beginning.†
Part 3

It's dualistically called a "discovery" because of the presumption that it has an existence independent of anyone's awareness of it.†
Part 3

At first Phaedrus presumed the reason for the difficulty was that all this was over his head.†
Part 4

Thus, in cultures whose ancestry includes ancient Greece, one invariably finds a strong subject-object differentiation because the grammar of the old Greek mythos presumed a sharp natural division of subjects and predicates.†
Part 4

Definitions:

(1) (presume as in: presumption of innocence)
to think of something as true or likely, even though it is not known with certainty

Something can be presumed because it seems reasonable or because there is a rule or law demanding such an assumption. For example, in the United States someone charged with a crime is presumed by law to be innocent unless they are proven guilty at a trial.
(2) (presumptuous as in: she is presumptuous)
exercising privileges to which one is not entitled -- such as being too familiar or too bossy