Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy Part 2

"Sometimes a candle is only a candle," he mused.

"Like a cigar?" asked Watson.

"Precisely," said Holmes. "But sometimes it sheds a great deal more light-"

"Than it emits physically?"

"Indeed, Watson. That is why, if you had grasped the essentials of the matter, you would have avoided the fancifully romantic t.i.tle, The Valley of Fear, and called your report The Adventure of the Candle and the Dumbbell. In recording other adventures, you were good enough to make things, or perhaps I should say, objects, the true heroes, though you did not always select the right ones. For example, 'The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle' might more appropriately have been called 'The Adventure of the Bowler Hat,' and-"

"I seem to recollect that we have had this sort of conversation before. One must make some concessions to popular taste. But to return to the candle . . ."

"You are well acquainted with my methods. You will recollect that upon entering the study where we believed the corpse of Mr. Douglas (as we then thought him to be called) was lying, I noticed, among other things, a candle that had been extinguished before much of it had burned away. This immediately led me to two conclusions: firstly, that the dead man's interview with his a.s.sailant had been brief, and secondly, that Mrs. Douglas and her husband's best friend, Cecil Barker, were giving a false account of events when they claimed that they had raised the alarm immediately after discovering the body. For, though it is conceivable that a man who had just discovered his best friend's body would have lit a lamp in order to view the scene better, it is unlikely that he should have thought about saving candle wax."

"And there was also the question of the missing wedding ring," said Watson. "If Barker's account was correct, there was no time for the a.s.sailant to remove it after the shooting, and the candle proved that there was no time for it to have been removed before!"

"And the ring was another thing, Watson. A thing which became an object! But to return to the candle. What is behind the use of that candle, indeed of any other candle?"

"The desire for light!"

"Indeed, Watson. But behind that desire for light in the house there is something else. Fear, Watson. Fear of darkness, and of what may lurk therein. Fear of b.u.mping into familiar household objects-which then seem to us no longer objects but things! Yes, and the worse fear of encountering the unfamiliar!"

"It was the fear of fire which made Douglas go the rounds of his property every night. Or so we then believed. It was more likely his fear of his old enemies, the Scowsers!"

"The fear of death is behind both of them, Watson. Perhaps the two were connected in his mind. The mining valley where he first had dealings with the Scowsers was also a place of fire, an infernal landscape, as I believe you describe it."

"Yet he met his fate by water in the end."

"Indeed. In the end, there is escape for no-one."

Holmes sighed deeply, doubtless thinking of the role Moriarty had played in this, and of his own failure to prevent it.

Then he continued, "Yet once we understand the extent to which fear and anxiety underlie ordinary human actions, we can all the better understand how men and women act in exceptional ones. Nowhere is this truer than in our relation to so-called things, Watson. We are motivated by fear, or by care, which is fear under a softer name. And that is how these things become objects! We light candles from the fear of darkness, we extinguish them from fear of fire or fear of poverty. We cast them aside when a greater fear makes it necessary to reach for a weapon!"

"As Douglas did when he reached for the hammer, in order to grapple with his old enemy, Ted Baldwin!"

"The presence of the hammer on the floor testified to that, Watson! As surely as if it had taken an oath in court. That hammer would not have remained in such a position otherwise. A tool or piece of equipment is nearly always removed from the floor by servants, prompted by the fear of losing their livelihood! And such a dismissal could doubtless be traced to their master's primordial fear of tripping over something. But more significant yet was my discovery of the single dumbbell. As I said at the time, no-one uses a single dumbbell, Watson, unless they wish to condemn themselves to curvature of the spine! Such a fear would, in most cases, I believe, outweigh the fear of decrepitude which motivates us to use a dumbbell in the first place. And, as previously stated, in an orderly household, with a fair-sized domestic staff, such items are unlikely to be allowed to wander around, as it were of their own freewill, as they sometimes do in the rooms of a bachelor of irregular habits."

"Indeed, Holmes, had you owned a pair of dumbbells, I should not have been surprised to find one of them in the coal scuttle and the other on the mantelpiece."

"If you had, Watson, there would have been a good reason for it, and behind that reason, would, doubtless, have been the fear of losing my intellectual faculties through simple want of stimulation. But to continue. In seeking to account for the missing dumbbell, again I looked at the problem from the perspective of linking it to the human body and to human fear. That dumbbell had been moved by a human hand. It was not the murder weapon. If it had been used in self-defence, as we later learned the hammer was, then, why should it have been removed when the other weapons were not? Yet fear is the most likely reason for its removal. Fear on the part of the guilty person that their guilt would be revealed and that they would end on the gallows! So, what was the fear? If the dumbbell were not removed for its own sake, it must have been used as the means to remove something else. And the nearness of water strongly suggested-"

"That it was used as a weight to sink that something else!"

"As was proved to be the case, Watson, with the aid of your excellent umbrella, which you imagined I had taken as a weapon. And in a sense that was true! A much more dangerous weapon than if I had banged on the man's head with it! For, mark, Watson, I was not content in having located the mere presence of that dumbbell and that which it had been used to conceal. Having looked into its past, I was also in a position to predict the thing's future. It was no longer a mere thing. It was an object! I knew that just as fear had buried it in the moat, so fear would resurrect it when I circulated the false rumour that the moat was to be drained and searched for evidence. Fear, using the agency of a human hand, Watson."

"And thus were Ted Baldwin's clothes and dagger discovered, and we made the even more important discovery that it was his mutilated body, and not that of Douglas, which was discovered in the study! And that the fair Mrs. Douglas was both a deceitful witness and a faithful wife!"

It was now Watson's turn to sigh a little.

"And with the aid of the pamphlet relating the history of the house in the seventeenth-century, we caused Mr. Douglas, wearing the wedding ring he could not or would not remove, to step forward from the hiding-place, which had once held the fugitive Charles II. See how mere things can be gathered together and woven into a net! It is then as if they have become a single object. Did you know that the Vikings called their Parliament a Thing, and that that meant a Gathering? Etymologies are important, Watson!"

"Would they not have done better to call it an Object, Holmes?"

"We cannot expect such distinctions of abstract thought from them, Watson."

"But Holmes, when we consider the things that we weaved together into our net, we should really have called our adventure the story of the candle, the dumbbell, the hammer, the ring, and the pamphlet!"

"That would not be so pithy," said Holmes.

"I stand by my original t.i.tle," said Watson. "According to your theory, are not the past and the future both valleys of fear, valleys of the shadow of death? And do not the most innocent of things and the most complex of objects continually lead us into those valleys?"

Holmes said nothing.

Postscript.

I am a very old man in this chilly spring of 1926, and perhaps I no longer think as clearly as I once did. Yet, hearing a friend of mine (my closest friend since the sad death of Sherlock Holmes)-a friend who is a great specialist in German philosophy-talk at great length of, and even go so far as to read me some extracts from, a new book which has been published in Germany, by one Martin Heidegger, it seemed to me that some of his ideas owed more than a little to my old friend Sherlock Holmes, though he uses a much more complicated terminology than Holmes's lucid distinction between the thing and the object!

Here is a philosopher, it seems, if I have understood him aright, who does not want to leave things lying about in the present tense. He wants to open what he calls Being up to the past and the future. What his purpose is in so doing, is far from clear to me. It has nothing to do with bringing the perpetrators of crime to justice. I fear much of what he says may be ineffable twaddle. And I distrust the Germans since the last war. Yet here and there, flas.h.i.+ng out like jewels among all that incomprehensible Teutonic verbiage, are Holmes's very ideas, the ideas which motivated his scientific practice and his transcendent success!

This philosopher also understands that we are forever in the grip of care and anxiety, of how the human being, whom he rather fancifully calls Being here or Dasein, always directs his attention to his coming death, and directs himself towards things as a means of avoiding it for a time! He even talks about directionality as one of the attributes of this Dasein. And if I follow him correctly, he thinks that we understand all this better if we also understand the important distinction between those unused things that we do not even think about using, those things which are merely present at hand as he calls them, and things which are ready to hand, those things which Holmes would have called objects!

These ready to hand things tend to have the character of equipment, equipment which is meant to help us in our daily struggle to stay alive! When they get broken and useless, they become ordinary present at hand things again. I would once have thought that this difference was too obvious to concern a great philosopher. But now that Sherlock Holmes is gone from the world, I understand exactly how much his genius depended on this simple ability to see everything in it as ready to hand, as something which could really be grasped! It was not just that he saw how others had grasped hold of the world in the past. He grasped it himself. The simplest displaced pebble could become his equipment and his weapon in the struggle against crime and the even greater struggle against our ignorance of the causes of things!

And when this German philosopher actually devotes a paragraph to speaking of equipment as something which either has its place or else is left lying around, I can only think of the significance of that hammer left lying on the floor in the study of Birlstone Manor, and that displaced dumbbell submerged in the moat . . .

If Holmes could have lived to see this, would he have sued this Heidegger for theft of intellectual property? I trust not. He was always willing to let others take the credit for his intellectual labours.

I think, in any case, that we have not heard the last of theories of things. They will probably grow to keep pace with all this newfangled equipment which proliferates in the modern world. And this German professor, who is doubtless a genius in his own wayG.o.d grant he be not another Moriarty in the making!-will, I dare say, develop his own ideas more in the future, though I shall not live to read them. Perhaps he will, in the mystical German manner, ponder that connection between the words 'think' and 'thing' which so intrigued Holmes. Perhaps one day he will even find a way of speaking of things which is not relentlessly related to our mortal fears, a way of just letting them be. At any rate, it seems to me that this philosopher is like my old friend in his quest for truth. For me the truth has always resembled the solution to a crossword puzzle. But for Holmes, for all his cold scientific ways, it was something much more concrete, something that had to be violently uncovered and dragged into the light.

-JHW.

Chapter 5.

Action Man or Dreamy Detective.

Sami Paavola and Lauri Jarvilehto.

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson were waiting for Miss Violet Hunter to contact them. The young woman had accepted the post of governess at the Rucastle household under the most curious conditions. The master sleuth's intuition told him something was amiss with Miss Hunter's case, but he could not pinpoint what it was.

"Data! data! data!" he cried impatiently. "I can't make bricks without clay."

-"The Adventure of the Copper Beeches"

Sherlock Holmes is renowned for his capacity to single out the essential from a bewildering array of trifles and so crack even the hardest of cases. This capacity has lent the detective an air of the supernatural. Holmes himself, however, would object to such interpretations. For the master detective, his power lies in his methodology.

How does Holmes come up with novel ideas? What's the secret of his masterful problem-solving skills? If he really has invented a method, can it be used for solving problems or making discoveries outside of the field of crime?

Holmes is, he tells us, about to write a textbook on the subject. He often complains that when reporting the cases Watson put too much emphasis on the story instead of instructive and rigorous demonstration. When Watson asks in annoyance why Holmes is not writing on the cases from this angle, Holmes remarks: "I will, my dear Watson, I will. At present I am, as you know, fairly busy, but I propose to devote my declining years to the composition of a textbook, which shall focus the whole art of detection into one volume." ("The Adventure of the Abbey Grange") Unfortunately for us, Holmes never had time to write this textbook. And we don't know for sure what he would have written, but we can follow up some clues from his cases.

Asking the Right Question.

Sherlock Holmes called his method by many names. It was the "Science of Deduction and a.n.a.lysis" or simply "Science of Deduction" which demands faculties of observation, and deduction, as well as knowledge on relevant areas of life. It required "curious a.n.a.lytic reasoning from effects to causes". It demanded faculties of deduction and logical synthesis; or a.n.a.lysis.

Jaakko Hintikka, a philosophical Sherlock in his own right, has maintained that Holmes's secret was the skillful use of the old Socratic method: in uniting the art of reasoning with the art of providing proper questions and answers. Other Socratics (like Matti Sintonen) have agreed. Holmes is able to find key issues in problematic situations by framing strategically useful questions. For example, in "Silver Blaze" the key question is the odd behavior, or actually the lack of behavior, of the dog during the robbery of the famous racing horse Silver Blaze: "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"

'To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."

"The dog did nothing in the night-time."

"That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.

Did the dog bark? No. Why does a watchdog not bark in the middle of the night, if something odd is happening? Because whatever was happening in the night-time, the perpetrator must have been somebody the dog knew well enough not to be disturbed by him.

As with many great discoveries, Holmes's questions seem self-evident after the discovery has been made. But as with many discoveries, coming up with the right questions beforehand is a very tricky task. Good questions are just those questions by which you eventually solve your case. But it takes a Sherlock Holmes, or Holmes's methods, to come up with such questions.

Playing the Guessing Game.

Holmes's reasoning does not only rely on knowing the definitional rules of logic. It's about coming up with chains of arguments which support the search for key issues in the case. It's more about having a good strategy for reasoning than about reasoning as such. As Hintikka has emphasized, the master player in games of chess is not the one who knows the basic rules of the game extremely well, but the one who is a master in the strategies and heuristics of the game. The same applies to the art of detection and reasoning.

It's often been claimed that Holmes's method was not, in fact, deduction, but abduction. Charles Peirce, the famous American philosopher and logician, maintained that reasoning falls into three categories.

Deduction, the pattern of reasoning by clarifying logical necessities.

Induction, reasoning on the basis of what "actually is."

Induction has attracted philosophers' minds for ages. We use various kinds of inductive reasoning all the time, for instance, when making generalizations. According to Peirce, there is, however, also another form of non-deductive reasoning: abduction.

Abduction, the main kind of reasoning we use for coming up with new ideas.

Abduction is weaker than induction. And it is much more speculative than deduction. Abduction is about crafting hypotheses and fertile possibilities on the basis of clues. Abduction is used when we look for possible explanations for somehow surprising events. Even if abduction is weak as a form of reasoning (it's about maybe's) it's strong and useful where discoveries and novelties are concerned. When we aim at inventing something new we cannot deduce it by necessity or inductively generalize it from existing knowledge. We need ways of inventing and developing new possibilities.

Despite being a fan of Edgar Allan Poe, the grand old man of the detective genre, Peirce himself did not make a strong connection between abduction and detective work. Others, such as Thomas A. Sebeok, Jean Umiker-Sebeok, and Umberto Eco have, however, noticed how Sherlock Holmes's work is often like abductive reasoning. Typically, abduction is about reasoning "backwards" from consequences to causes or explanations. When a murder has happened, various signs are left at the crime scene that tell us something about the crime and the perpetrator. Abduction is coming up with explanations for these signs.

Reasoning backwards is what Sherlock Holmes calls "a.n.a.lytic," as opposed to "synthetic" reasoning. Synthetic reasoning is asking: What happens next? a.n.a.lytic reasoning is asking: How did this come about?

"In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backward. . . . In the everyday affairs of life it is more useful to reason forward, and so the other comes to be neglected. There are fifty who can reason synthetically for one who can reason a.n.a.lytically." (A Study in Scarlet) We know the end result. The trick is to use this knowledge for inventing novel hypotheses about how the result came about.

Holmes is always making detailed observations and minute investigations at the crime scene in order to provide materials to start these backward reasonings. Abductive reasoners especially look for strange happenings and little details that don't quite fit, as clues when searching for potential explanations. As Sherlock Holmes says in "The Bos...o...b.. Valley Mystery": "You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles."

Details and strange happenings can be used as a starting point for providing logically elegant solutions and chains of reasoning. These details can be so small that at one extreme abductions turn on hints which we're not even aware of. Nonetheless, they can help when guessing and searching candidate solutions.

Abduction is not, however, just wild, intuitive guesswork. While the process of discovery might begin with intuitively forming a hypothesis, such a hypothesis is in the end strengthened in a very Sherlockian manner: by drawing deductive inferences that coincide with the known facts.

Maybes and Must Bes.

The beginning phases of Holmes's abductive process involve minute observation, guesswork, and imagination. Holmes can craft several possible scenarios that could be used to crack a given conundrum. He does not, however, commit to any single one before he had enough information to settle on a single hypothesis: "I have devised seven separate explanations, each of which would cover the facts as far as we know them. But which of these is correct can only be determined by the fresh information which we shall no doubt find waiting for us." ("The Adventure of the Copper Beeches") Holmes also holds that imagination has a key role in drawing his impressive inferences: "See the value of imagination. . . . It is the one quality which Gregory lacks. We imagined what might have happened, acted upon the supposition, and find ourselves justified." ("Silver Blaze") While observation, guesswork, and imagination are central to abduction, this peculiar mode of inference involves more than just guessing. Indeed, Sherlock himself objected to plain guesswork in The Sign of the Four: "I never guess. It is a shocking habit-destructive to the logical faculty."

Abduction is not pure guesswork but is based on skillful use of clues and constraints. Guesswork and imagination function as the first stage of discovery. The ingenuity of Holmes's method is combining the imaginative capacity with impressive skills in all forms of inference. Holmes firmly objects to speculations on their own. Only once data has been gathered can we draw up a hypothesis: "It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment" (A Study in Scarlet).

Good abductive "guesses" need some material. The inquirer uses clues, previous knowledge, and new observations to trigger and guide guesses. These speculations must then be checked separately. This is not traditional inductive methodology where data is simply compiled together in order to reach more general truths. Rather, data provides triggers for searching explanations and novel perspectives.

While the grounds for abductive reasoning can be based on drawing hypotheses on the basis of clues, the whole process of reasoning also involves deduction and induction. New premises are introduced by antic.i.p.ating how to draw deductions from them. If the deductions are verified by novel observations, the hypothesis is strengthened, otherwise not. The inquiry process requires three processes of reasoning: abduction, deduction, and induction.

A clear example of the process of Holmes's combining abduction with deduction and induction can be found in the cla.s.sic encounter of Holmes and Watson near the beginning of A Study in Scarlet. When he first meets Watson, Holmes quickly concludes that Watson has been in Afghanistan. Later Sherlock explains this to Watson: "The train of reasoning ran, 'Here is a gentleman of a medical type, but with the air of a military man. Clearly an army doctor, then. . . .'"

The start of this train of reasoning is then more like detailed observation.

"He has just come from the tropics, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair. . . ."

This is an abductive explanation for the darkness of the face, which is clearly not Watson's natural tint (on the basis of a clue concerning his wrists).

"He has undergone hards.h.i.+p and sickness, as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where in the tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hards.h.i.+p and got his arm wounded? Clearly in Afghanistan."

An abductive explanation for various clues and observations (injured arm, coming from tropics, army doctor) pointed with a key question.

"The whole train of thought did not occupy a second. I then remarked that you came from Afghanistan, and you were astonished."

And then, if needed, from the hypothesis that Watson is an injured army doctor who has just come from Afghanistan, supported by some additional, commonplace suppositions, all details can be deduced and the whole thing checked inductively.

Three to Get Ready.

Besides abduction there is another Peircean idea which illuminates Sherlock Holmes's methods.

Peirce founded his famous theory of signs on an elegantly simple idea of three basic categories: Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. These categories appear in many forms. As metaphysical categories, firstnesses are things in themselves. Good examples are qualities of feeling, possibilities and icons. Secondnesses are two things clas.h.i.+ng against each other, such as reactions, actualities and indices. Thirdnesses concern mediation, where some things are brought together with mediating processes which is more complicated than just two things reacting with each other, such as rules, symbols and reasoning.

Even though they are categories, the strength of firstnesses, secondnesses, and thirdnesses comes from combinations and mixtures. For example, abduction is a form of reasoning. Therefore it is about mediation and Thirdness. But its peculiarity comes from using tones, potentialities, iconic resemblances-firstnesses-as a fuel for reasoning: the clues and elements from which the abductive hypotheses are formed.

An important part of Holmes's methods is that he is so good at combining in his work the different Peircean categories: qualities of feeling and imagination, actions and reactions, and different forms of reasoning. It's more typical to be good at one of these areas, or maybe at two of them. Holmes is a Peircean savant: an expert in all three categories. Although Holmes doesn't always want to admit it, reasoning includes an element of the dream (especially through abductions) and action (with inductions). Peircean categories work for each other.

Most famously, Sherlock Holmes is uncanny in drawing inference, and he often emphasizes their exact and "scientific" nature. "Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner" (The Sign of the Four).

Holmes could solve some easier cases just by armchair reasoning. But he's also a man of action. This takes several forms. He is a true forerunner of crime scene investigation with the use of various instruments like a magnifying gla.s.s or a tape measure to get the evidence he needs, instead of relying only on what can be seen by the naked eye.

Holmes is keen on making experiments which help him to a.n.a.lyze evidence, like making a test for blood stains, or distinguis.h.i.+ng differences in cigar ashes. These kinds of experiments were complemented by his detailed knowledge of crimes and horrors perpetrated down the centuries, which he refers to while searching for apparent novelties. "There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before" (A Study in Scarlet).