Practicing statisticians often employ data reduction tools to arrive at conclusions on the distributions from which the data were sampled. There is already a wide use for machine learning and data mining techniques in the sciences, and we may expect even mode usage of these techniques in the future, because so much data is now coming available for scientific analysis. However, in the philosophy of statistics there is as yet little debate over the epistemic status of conclusions reached by means of these techniques. Philosophers of statistics would do well to direct some attention here.