Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy

by Josef Steiff

  Moreover, it’s quite reasonable to believe that these conspiracies are responsible for bringing about the events that have been attributed to them. But many philosophers argue that it’s irrational to believe in most conspiracy theories. For instance, it’s clearly crazy to think that the Freemasons were behind the assassination of JFK or that water fluoridation is part of an Illuminati plot to take over the world. It would be almost miraculous that such undetected criminal conspiracies exist, yet no concrete evidence of their secret activities has come to light. Explaining away this lack of evidence requires extreme skepticism about many of our main sources of information about the world. The police and journalists would have to be incredibly incompetent, or they themselves would have to be involved in the conspiracy.

  However, in at least one notable instance, this is precisely the sort of thing that Holmes, who “was pre-eminent in intelligence” (“The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter”), believes in. He thinks that Professor Moriarty “is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. . . . He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans. But his agents are numerous and splendidly organized” (“The Final Problem”). Among other crimes, Moriarty is responsible for the death of John Douglas in The Valley of Fear. Also, in the television adaptation with Jeremy Brett, he is really the mastermind behind The Red-Headed League.

  Such conspiracies theories certainly have their attractions. They imply that things do not just happen at random, that human beings are able to control the course of events. Also, from what Watson tells us, Moriarty actually is “some deep organizing power which forever stands in the way of the law, and throws its shield over the wrong-doer.” But is it reasonable for Holmes to believe that this is true?

  According to Watson, “it will be within the memory of the public how completely the evidence which Holmes had accumulated exposed their organization” (“The Final Problem”). However, it is interesting that we only ever hear about two meager pieces of circumstantial evidence against Moriarty. First, he owns a painting by Jean Baptiste Greuze that he could not possibly afford on his “professor’s salary.” Second, he writes checks on at least six different banks, which suggests to Holmes “that he wanted no gossip about his wealth. No single man should know what he had” (The Valley of Fear).

  In fact, like most conspiracy theorists, Holmes even takes a lack of evidence to be evidence of the very existence of the conspiracy. He says to Watson, “Ay, there’s the genius and the wonder of the thing! . . . The man pervades London, and no one has heard of him” (“The Final Problem”). Moreover, Holmes has trouble convincing intelligent people about the threat of Moriarty. Inspector Alec MacDonald of Scotland Yard tells him, “I won’t conceal from you, Mr. Holmes, that we think in the C.I.D. that you have a wee bit of a bee in your bonnet over this professor. I made some inquiries myself about the matter. He seems to be a very respectable, learned, and talented sort of man” (The Valley of Fear). And even Watson wonders whether Holmes might sometimes suffer

  from some huge self-deception? Was it not possible that his nimble and speculative mind had built up this wild theory upon faulty premises? I had never known him to be wrong, and yet the keenest reasoner may occasionally be deceived. He was likely, I thought, to fall into error through the over-refinement of his logic—his preference for a subtle and bizarre explanation when a plainer and more commonplace one lay ready to his hand. (The Sign of the Four)

  This sort of deception is not the same as the interpersonal deception we’ve been discussing so far. Self-deception is usually not intentional. In fact, some philosophers argue that it is not even possible to intentionally deceive yourself.

  In Holmes’s defense, he does have independent reasons to think that the police and journalists are incompetent. With regard to the police, Holmes notes that Gregson and Lestrade “are the pick of a bad lot” and that being “out of their depths . . . is their normal state” (A Study in Scarlet). And with regard to journalists, Holmes finds it easy to mislead them whenever he needs some false information to appear in the papers as he does in “The Adventure of the Six Napoleons” and in “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client.”

  The press never seems to give Holmes sufficient credit for his successes. He remarks that “out of my last fifty-three cases my name has only appeared in four, and the police have had all the credit in forty-nine” (“The Adventure of the Naval Treaty”). This also may have to do with Holmes misleading them, as “nothing amused him more at the end of a successful case than to hand over the actual exposure to some orthodox official, and to listen with a mocking smile to the general chorus of misplaced congratulation” (“The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot”).

  Detecting Deception

  Holmes claims that “What one man can invent another can discover” (“The Adventure of the Dancing Men”). But exactly how do we go about detecting deception? These days, the most common technique is to use a polygraph, which monitors physiological indicators of stress, such as perspiration and increased blood pressure, that are associated with lying. The polygraph was developed after Holmes retired to the south of England to keep bees. However, the technique that Holmes actually uses turns out to be even more effective than the polygraph.

  Paul Ekman is a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco and is perhaps the greatest living expert on lying. He is also the inspiration for another fictional detective, Cal Lightman, from the television series Lie to Me. Ekman has trained himself and others to observe extremely short-lived facial expressions that reveal people’s emotions. And when these “microexpressions” do not fit with what a person is saying, it can be a very good indication of deceit.

  In a similar vein, Holmes “claimed by a momentary expression, a twitch of a muscle or a glance of an eye, to fathom a man’s inmost thoughts. Deceit, according to him, was an impossibility in the case of one trained to observation and analysis” (A Study in Scarlet). In “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder,” Holmes observes that Oldacre’s housekeeper, Mrs. Lexington, has “a sort of sulky defiance in her eyes, which only goes with guilty knowledge.”

  Also, in “The Resident Patient,” he uses this technique to read Watson’s thoughts and then gives the following explanation: “The features are given to man as the means by which he shall express his emotions, and yours are faithful servants.” “Do you mean to say you read my train of thoughts from my features?” “Your features and especially your eyes.” This technique is so important that Holmes and Watson had exactly the same conversation twice. However, in “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box,” the conversation takes place in August 1888 rather than October 1881. But any lie detection technique can be beaten. For instance, Professor Moriarty’s “soft, precise fashion of speech leaves a conviction of sincerity” (“The Final Problem”).

  But despite the power of this technique, Holmes does not usually discover that someone is lying to him because of what he observes in their features. Just like the rest of us, when he catches someone lying, it’s typically because what she says doesn’t fit with what he already knows or with what he later finds out. As Holmes puts it, “we must look for consistency. Where there is a want of it we must suspect deception” (“The Problem of Thor Bridge”).

  In “The Problem of Thor Bridge,” Holmes figures out that someone is trying to deceive because it just does not make sense “that after carrying out so crafty a crime you would now ruin your reputation as a criminal by forgetting to fling your weapon into those adjacent reed-beds which would forever cover it, but you must needs carry it carefully home and put it in your own wardrobe, the very first place that would be searched.” In a similar vein, regarding Cecil Barker’s story,

  “Consider! According to the story given to us, the assassin had less than a minute after the murder had been committed to take that ring, which was
under another ring, from the dead man’s finger, to replace the other ring—a thing which he would surely never have done—and to put that singular card beside his victim. I say that this was obviously impossible.”

  Finally, regarding John Garrideb’s story, “Here is a man with an English coat frayed at the elbow and trousers bagged at the knee with a year’s wear, and yet by this document and by his own account he is a provincial American lately landed in London.”

  Useless Facts

  If we want to be able to detect deception, it’s important not to clutter our minds with a lot of other unimportant stuff. As Holmes tells Watson, “there comes a time when for every addition to knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones” (A Study in Scarlet).

  About a hundred years later, the Princeton philosopher Gilbert Harman rediscovered this important fact about our cognitive economy. He said,

  there is a practical reason to avoid too much clutter in one’s beliefs. There is a limit to what one can remember, a limit to the number of things one can put into long-term storage, and a limit to what one can retrieve. It is important to save room for important things and not clutter one’s mind with a lot of unimportant matters.

  At least in Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, it seems that Holmes has trouble following his own advice. He laments that “some of us are cursed with memories like flypaper, and stuck there is a staggering amount of miscellaneous data, mostly useless.”

  Yet it’s hard to say ahead of time which facts will turn out to be useful. In A Study in Scarlet, Holmes is not concerned that he does not know that “the earth travelled round the sun.” However, such astronomical ignorance gets him into trouble in “The Great Game.” It almost takes Holmes too long to recognize that a Vermeer is a fake because it depicts in the sky a supernova that did not appear until almost two hundred years after the painter’s death. As Holmes ironically admits in The Valley of Fear, “All knowledge comes useful to the detective,” even a “trivial fact.”

  Wrapping Up the Case

  As we learn from Holmes, in order to avoid being deceived, we have to ask why someone might want to deceive us, how she might go about doing so, who she might be, and how we might detect the deception. Philosophers can help us to answer these questions by enumerating what the different possible answers are. And, as we have seen, the illustrious career of the world’s first private “consulting detective” provides concrete examples of all these different types of deceit. In addition, studying these examples through the “powerful magnifying lens” of philosophy illuminates why Holmes was such a successful detective.

  Although Watson claims in A Study in Scarlet that Holmes knew “next to nothing” about philosophy, he was certainly well-versed in the epistemology of deception. And once Holmes had retired to the south coast of England, Watson records in the preface to His Last Bow that “his time is divided between philosophy and agriculture.”

  Before most philosophers who have written about deception were even born, Holmes was well aware of the various different methods of deceiving people. Not only did he foil numerous criminals who tried to use these methods to “get away with murder,” but he employed many of these methods himself. He was also ahead of his time in developing techniques for detecting deception (as with the use of “microexpressions”). And he probably would have beaten these philosophers into print on the varieties of deception if his planned “textbook, which shall focus the whole art of detection into one volume” had been published. But it must also be granted that his penchant for conspiracy theories may sometimes have led Holmes to see deception even when it was not really there.

  I would like to thank Tony Doyle, Daniel Griffin, Sydney Johnson, Peter Lewis, Kay Mathiesen, and an audience at the School of Information Resources at the University of Arizona for many helpful suggestions on this chapter.

  Chapter 17

  Watson’s a Liar!

  Rory E. Kraft, Jr.

  While this may be an odd place to start, I want to emphasize from the beginning that I am not one of those freaks who wanders around in a deerstalker hat, muttering things like “Elementary my dear Watson.” Those poor people seem not to be able to separate fact from fiction. We find no mention of either the ridiculous hat or that silly line in the recognized John Watson memoirs (to which I add the two accounts penned by Holmes himself and the two stories we don’t know who wrote.)

  But like many, I dismiss the possibility that the Holmes stories were written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle was a failed physician and sometime spiritualist who also published works related to Atlantis and living dinosaurs in South America. It would be quite unreasonable to assume that he was able to “invent” the quite rational Holmes. Clearly Watson, in order to greater protect his own and Holmes’s identities, used pseudonyms and utilized Doyle as a literary agent. It is worth noting in passing that the famous address 221B Baker Street did not exist at the times of Holmes’s adventures, Baker Street then numbering only up to 100. This bit of misdirection is sufficient enough to show that just as their flat was obscured, so were Holmes and Watson’s real names.

  To be clear however, just because Holmes did something is not a reason to follow along. I am unlikely to take up cocaine anytime soon, even if Sherlock believed the seven percent solution was “so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind” (The Sign of the Four).

  In any event, I seem to have wandered away from my proper beginning point. Those of us who study Holmes do so for a simple reason: we seek truth. In these adventures we see not only good reasoning going on, but puzzles about the nature of reasoning, and puzzles about the nature of truth itself.

  Do Not Trust Watson. Ever

  A central problem in reading the Holmes stories is that we’re generally being led by what literary types refer to as an untrustworthy narrator. Watson throughout the stories tells us that he has changed information in order to protect confidences. (For example, consider that we never learn in which college the “Adventure of the Three Students” occurs, because revealing this would be “injudicious and offensive.”) Further, as some of the stories are recounted years after they occurred, based upon notes, and given Holmes’s desire not to have more accounts published, we find that many of them can be considered “carefully guarded” and “somewhat vague in certain details” (“Adventure of the Second Stain”).

  No doubt some of these omissions and changes were at Holmes’s request, as he believed that “Some facts should be suppressed, or, at least, a just sense of proportion should be observed in treating them” (The Sign of the Four).

  Watson, however, assures us (in a comment to Holmes) that he “could not tamper with the truth” by leaving out the romantic elements of A Study in Scarlet. But it is just those romantic elements that cause us problems. Who exactly is the author of the Utahsection of the memoirs, and how did Watson come to integrate it into his work? Even if we grant that perhaps Watson shifted to a third-person narrator for these aspects he was not directly witnessing, we still have the problem of determining how he came to know these events, as Jefferson Hope died shortly after being arrested.

  But even when it comes to aspects that need not be obscured, we find that Watson is less than reputable. Perhaps the most famous example of this is Watson’s wandering wound. We discover in the second paragraph of A Study in Scarlet that Watson was wounded while fighting in Afghanistan. He “was struck on the shoulder by a Jezail bullet, which shattered the bone and grazed the subclavian artery.” But later in The Sign of the Four we find Watson nursing his wounded leg, which “had a Jezail bullet through it some time before” and “ached wearily at every change of the weather.” While it is always possible that Watson was hit through the leg, with the bullet then hitting the shoulder causing the other damage, I have yet to determine how anyone can contort himself such that a single bullet would travel in such a manner. Watson would hav
e had to be folded in upon himself.

  Nor is it likely that he would omit mentioning a larger (multishot) wound initially. Watson after all tells Holmes of his own pet dog, which never appears again in the stories. If something as minor as a quickly forgotten pet is mentioned at the outset, I assume that something as major as a double wound would have been acknowledged.

  Even the casual reader of Holmes is likely to have heard of the struggles that some go through to properly date the various adventures. But few realize that given Watson’s fast and loose way with facts, even some of the most obvious clues are suspect. For example, we have ample evidence in A Study in Scarlet that Holmes and Watson met in 1881. Given that the conversation between Watson and Holmes on the nature of ‘deduction’ (as explained in “The Book of Life”) is closely followed by the appearance of Gregson’s note, most assume that the Drebber-Stangerson murders occurred in March of 1882. However, the notice in the Standard that Watson reprints in Chapter 6 of A Study in Scarlet clearly puts the murder as occurring on Tuesday, March 4th. The closest Tuesday, March 4th to the 1881 meeting is 1879, prior to their meeting. The next is in 1884. But we know that the “Adventure of the Speckled Band” occurs in April of 1883.