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Soshichi Uchii, Kyoto University, Japan
Paper presented for the Lunchtime Colloquium,
Sept. 24, 1991, Center for Philosophy of Science,
Univ. of Pittsburgh
(Q0) "From a drop of water," said the writer, "a logician could infer the possibility of an
Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it. Like all other arts, the Science of Deduction and Analysis is one which can only be acquired by long and patient study, nor is life long enough to allow any mortal to attain the highest possible perfection in it. " [A Study in Scarlet, pt. 1, ch. 2]
1. What does Holmes have to do with
philosophy of science?
Today, I am going to talk about Sherlock Holmes and his relationship with philosophy of science. Since my talk is going to be something like background music, hopefully, for your lunch, I have chosen a rather light topic instead of a heavy dose of philosophy of science.
To begin with, let me briefly outline what I am going to say. Of course you know who Sherlock Holmes is, although you may not know in detail what he did and what he said. Everyone knows that he was a very good detective and solved many difficult problems in criminal investigations. Everyone knows that he was an expert of reasoning and observation, so that he could frequently tell, on his first acquaintance with you, who you are and what you do, or where you come from, just by looking at you. [By the way, do you believe that Sherlock Holmes exists? If you believe that, you are a Sherlockian!]
But how many of you know that he was a good logician, namely, a logician according to the standard of the late 19th century? If you already know this and can prove it, then probably there is no need to listen to me any more. For the first thing I want to show is that he was a good logician, and I wish to prove this on the evidence of what he did, and what he said he was doing (of course, as told by Dr. Waston or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). This can be shown in a rather general way, not getting into any specific details of his reasoning.
Secondly, I wish to show what his method of reasoning was. This is a harder task than the first, because we have to identify the essential features of his method of reasoning. In order to show this, I have not only to examine what he says he is doing, but also to look at the methods of scientific reasoning recommended by several distinguished philosophers of science in the 19th century. I want to examine Holmes's method of reasoning in a historical setting; and this has something to do with the philosophy of science in the 19th century, and hopefully with the philosophy of science today. I will examine whether such methods are similar or dissimilar to Holmes's method. Logicians and philosophers I wish to examine are, John Herschel, John Stuart Mill, William Whewell, Augustus de Morgan, and William Stanley Jevons; however, since we do not have much time, I cannot do justice to all of them.
If I may suggest my conclusion in advance, for those listeners who are impatient, it is this: Sherlock Holmes was distinctly different from Herschel or Mill or Whewell who may be called a classical methodologist; but he was very close to de Morgan or Jevons who were an advocate of new symbolic logic and probabilistic theory of induction. And this makes him closer to logicians in the 20th century (although I am quite sure Holmes didn't know Frege at all).
But what is the point of showing all this? The rise and development of statistical method in the19th century had a great impact on the theories of scientific reasoning, and de Morgan's or Jevons's theory is a newer theory of induction in this century. And such a change of methodology is clearly reflected in the popular stories of Sherlock Holmes, which were written in the late 19th century and early 20th century.
June 21, 1998; last modified, April 16, 2006. (c) Soshichi Uchii
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