by Josef Steiff
The detective is not in the business of jailing or prosecuting criminals as in The Hound of Baskervilles or “The Speckled Band.” Holmes’s true payoff is a poetic one.
Chapter 19
A Touch of the Dramatic
Tamás Demeter
Is Sherlock Holmes a cold-blooded scientist, a human computer, a dessicated calculating machine? Or is he an artist, a visionary, a dreamer of strange romances?
Holmes keeps telling Watson, and telling us, that he’s a scientist. And Holmes believes that being a scientist involves looking at the facts without prejudice, and then making deductions from those observed facts.
You would think from all this that if you accurately observe the facts, and are good at logical reasoning, you would be able to solve crimes like Holmes. But we know that there’s more to it than that.
Holmes often insists that his own peculiar talents are cold, austere, logical, scientific, and unemotional. He prizes “that severe reasoning from cause to effect which is really the only notable feature” of any case. According to Holmes, “whatever is emotional is opposed to that true cold reason which I place above all things.” He declares that “The emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning.” Watson think s of him as “the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen” Holmes often seems to imply that the solution of a case follows logically from the evidence. “I never guess. It is a shocking habit, destructive to the logical faculty.” And yet, we know that Holmes often entertains one theory of a case, only to discard it later, in favor of a better theory.
Holmes’s own description of what he does when solving cases is a somewhat misleading account of what he actually does. His description leaves out the crucial role of intuition, imagination, inspired guesswork, or artistic flair.
Between gathering the facts and solving the crime, Sherlock Holmes is a creator of stories: his stories are explanations of what might have happened, imaginative constructions of possible scenarios. Once the stories have been composed, they can then be compared with the observed facts of the case. These facts support or contradict the stories in different ways. It is here that Holmes uses his reasoning powers to pick the true story from among several alternative stories.
Creating Stories
However cold-blooded and methodical Holmes’s technique of selecting a true explanation may seem, he first has to invent these stories—which we may also call scientific hypotheses. This crucial phase of inventing hypotheses is not a matter of observation and deduction. It requires something like artistic imagination.
Holmes’s hypotheses are in fact different narratives each establishing possible connections among the various facts he has collected. These connections bestow significance upon the facts, and thereby they turn them into evidence: the way in which facts are interconnected within a particular narrative structure reveals their possible implications and relevance in various, and sometimes conflicting, ways.
Having arrived at possible hypotheses with different distribution of significance among various facts, selecting the true narrative can be deductive. Yet organizing facts into narrative patterns requires a set of values and sensitivities that go far beyond observation and deduction. In fact, Holmes’s method requires an immense strength of narrative imagination, a quality he finds conspicuously missing in inspectors Lestrade and Gregory.
There are several passages in various stories in which Sherlock Holmes himself or other figures like Dr. Watson or Lestrade comment on the methods Holmes follows in his investigations. In these passages this method is described as purely deductive. However, as Peter Lipton has pointed out, it is not deductive in the strictly logical sense. According to logic, deduction means that the conclusion must be true if the premises are true. But typically in Holmes’s ‘deductions’, Holmes’s solution to the case is not logically guaranteed to be correct if the premises (the items are evidence) are correct.
Furthermore, collecting facts is at least as crucial a pillar of Holmes’s method as drawing conclusions from them. Facts are collected by minute observations and an analysis of experience. Collecting peculiar and unusual facts is the key to solving the cases, because singular events can be explored through their singular features that distinguish them from more routine events. As Holmes points out, “The most commonplace crime is often the most mysterious, because it presents no new or special features from which deductions may be drawn” (A Study in Scarlet).
Holmes emphasizes in “The Science of Deduction” (The Sign of the Four) that deduction and observation are two distinct phases of investigation. Working out the possible implications of facts collected leads to a pool of possible explanatory hypotheses.
The phase of creating hypotheses is not strictly deductive; given the total evidence Holmes collects in support of his hypotheses, the hypotheses may easily prove to be false—and sometimes indeed they do turn out to be false. But the process of selecting the true hypothesis from the pool of possible hypotheses can be made out to be deductive. As Holmes puts it: “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth” (The Sign of the Four; this statement appears again nearly verbatim in “The Blanched Soldier”).
Holmes frequently applies this eliminative strategy not only in the final reconstruction of a case, but sometimes also while taking steps in the course of investigation, while deciding which hypothesis to accept for the moment as working hypothesis. If seen from this angle, Holmes is almost naturally represented as a “scientific detective”; even if his body of knowledge, consisting almost exclusively of information or collected evidence relevant for criminal investigation, is “without a scientific system” (“The Lion’s Mane”).
Closer to Art than Science?
This intermediate phase of Holmes’s method, namely the one that lies in between collecting facts and selecting the true hypothesis, is the construction of the pool of hypotheses from which selection can proceed deductively. This consists in working out the implications and establishing connections among various pieces of possible evidence—the phase of finding out how things might have been.
You might think that this part of Holmes’s method is closer to art than science: it requires more of an artistic imagination than the ability to make accurate deductions. It’s a form of narrative explanation, and understanding this feature in Holmes’s method allows the image of a “scientific detective” to be unmasked as the ideology of Holmesian inquiry which serves the purposes of advancing Holmes’s profession.
In fact this creative use of the imagination is always vital to science. The description of science as purely logical is a huge blunder, a blunder that people were sometimes prone to make in the Victorian era. All the greatest scientific advances—those of Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, or Pasteur—involve vast leaps of the imagination. No logical method has ever been found for generating good hypotheses. This aspect of science was most famously captured by Albert Einstein, when he said: “I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
Are Bizarre Explanations Better?
As Watson notes explicitly, Holmes had “a preference for a subtle and bizarre explanation when a plainer and more commonplace one lay ready to his hand.” This is not always a virtue when searching for the truth, and thus it’s hardly surprising that even Watson notes that some of Holmes’s inferences are erroneous precisely because of this preference. Normally, simplicity is one of the main reasons for giving preference to one hypothesis over another, and if Holmes were in the business of inferring to the best explanation, this would be a value to keep an eye on. Search for the most simple explanation! should be one of his main heuristic rules. But in fact, for Holmes, it isn’t.
Holmes has rules for discovering facts, and these rules help us to distinguish Holmes’s method from that of professional detectives in Doyle’s stories. An important methodological rule can be distilled from Holmes’s warning that “T
here is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact” (“The Boscombe Valley Mystery”).
As we know from Watson’s chronicles, Holmes’s colleagues are inclined to rely on items of evidence according to their manifest weight, and therefore they are also inclined to ignore, or not even notice, facts which look insignificant. Holmes consciously avoids such prejudice concerning possible pieces of evidence. The unconscious preference for the obvious naturally leads Holmes’s colleagues to overlook relevant or potentially relevant facts, and this inclination often leads to going astray in the course of investigation. Even Holmes sometimes makes this mistake, as early in “Silver Blaze” for example.
This rule can be generalized from the phase of fact-collecting to the entire process of investigation: “I make a point of never having any prejudices, and of following docilely wherever fact may lead me” (“The Reigate Puzzle”). While it seems that his professional colleagues are more inclined to cling to the first theory they have thought of, Holmes takes pain to collect facts as impartially and as completely as possible, and to speculate only after that. The inclination to build theories on conclusions hastily drawn diverts the proper course of investigation by making facts subservient to theories. As one of Holmes’s central methodological rules has it: “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts” (“A Scandal in Bohemia”).
Fact collecting may be distorted by trying to make the facts fit a prior theory, yet we can’t avoid setting up hypotheses at some stage of the investigation. Our hypotheses may then lead us astray, as in “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” but this danger is less threatening if hypotheses do not grow into prejudices and always remain liable to revision in the light of some new fact or by the recombination of already acquired ones.
Connecting the Dots
Holmes’s egalitarian approach to facts, his reluctance to discriminate among them in the initial phase of fact collecting, poses the problem of weighing different items of evidence. Initially, all facts collected are equal with respect to their potential relevance to the case to be solved. But eventually some of them prove to be more significant than others: some prove to be highly relevant for the final explanation, and others are left out completely.
The weight of a piece of evidence may also change as the investigation goes ahead. So what is Holmes’s method for apportioning weight to different pieces of evidence? Some obvious answers are ruled out. Preferring those pieces of evidence that lead to the simplest explanation is not an option for him, as we have seen. Relying on the most obvious facts is ruled out as well, as is organizing evidences so as to support the most plausible candidate among competing hypotheses—that would amount to twisting facts to fit theories.
Holmes’s way of weighing evidences is that of finding patterns in the collection of facts. The core of Holmes’s heuristics consists in establishing connections between various facts with an attention to their possible implications. Not every fact is turned into evidence in every pattern: different patterns may not agree on which facts count as evidences and which are mere disturbing noises. And so “when a fact appears to be opposed to a long train of deductions, it invariably proves to be capable of bearing some other interpretation” (A Study in Scarlet)—an interpretation which ascribes the fact some different significance or abolishes its status as evidence. And so, it is patterns that turn a fact into evidence by bestowing significance on them in a particular structure that establishes interconnections between facts and reveal their possible implications in various and sometimes conflicting ways.
Any particular pattern automatically distributes significance among facts: the weight of a piece of evidence is a consequence of its place within a pattern. This is why Holmes sometimes decides on “elucidating” hypotheses by further investigation even if there are “many grave objections” to them, as he does in “The Cardboard Box.” Without doing so, it is much easier to overlook facts of potential significance, and to take obvious facts at face value. The process of elucidation results in a pool of possible hypotheses, possible patterns of facts, from among which the true one can be selected in the final phase of investigation by eliminating the impossible ones.
An Order of Significance
These patterns are organized by narrative principles. As Louis Mink has pointed out, a coherent narrative, whether historical or fictional, represents “actions and events . . . as it were in a single glance as bound together in an order of significance.” The structure of events in a story enables us to understand it, by giving unity to a succession of events. The unity is not inherent in the facts, without the contribution of narrative imagination, and this unity cannot be inferred simply from a step-by-step analysis of effects and causes. Starting from an assortment of facts, unity can be created in many ways; the coherence of facts can be established in various patterns, and therefore several possible scenarios can be set up for further investigation.
The type of understanding given to us by Holmes’s approach is, to use Mink’s typology, configurational and differs from both theoretical and categoreal modes (as Mink calls them) that are characteristic to scientific and philosophical approaches respectively. In the theoretical mode, a number of instances are subsumed under, and understood as the consequences of, a generalization or law; in the categoreal mode, a number of instances are represented as belonging to the same category that gives form to experience itself. At this point it is easy to conclude that neither of these two is characteristic of Holmes’s method; his preference for the bizarre and unusual excludes the possibility of theoretical comprehension, and his warnings against prejudices that distort observation excludes the categoreal approach.
It is the configurational mode of comprehension that informs Holmes’s perspective; it holds together various pieces of information as elements in a single complex of concrete relationships. So understood, particular facts of a case are comprehended not under some abstract scheme of laws or categories, but they are smoothly woven together as evidences into a coherent narrative pattern.
Framing the Story
Various facts in these patterns acquire their weight as evidence due to the significance they posses in relation to the conclusion of the narrative. In this context facts can have “retrospective significance” which is accessible only if they are looked at from the teleological perspective of the narrative (Noël Carroll, Beyond Aesthetics, p. 127). This is the typical perspective Holmes adopts, and this explains why Holmes has a preference for seemingly irrelevant minutiae: facts that are not in themselves informative can be charged with significance by recognizing their possible implications in the light of the final outcome. They are thus “important . . . without being interesting” (“A Case of Identity”). This outlook also explains why Holmes needs an all-facts-areequal approach in the initial stage of investigation: we can never know when a fact will turn out to be eventually relevant. This can be decided only in relation to the ending, which may be elusive in more mysterious cases.
Organizing facts into a narrative structure suits Holmes’s preference for bizarre explanations. A plausible conclusion of a narrative, unlike that of an inductive inference from facts, does not need to follow with high probability; it does not need to be likely given the antecedents. And the same holds for the connection of facts within the narrative pattern.
Probability may be a good guide in some contexts, but it is also a kind of prejudice based on previous experiences. In a narrative framework, probability is not a good guide. Rather, antecedent events are expected to fill in some void, contribute some missing piece, however surprising or improbable. What matters is whether they enhance grasping the whole case together:
“The more outré and grotesque an incident is the more carefully it deserves to be examined, and the very point which appears to complicate a case is, when duly considered and scientifically handled, the one which is most likely to elucidate it.” (The Hound of the Baskervilles)
The fact that pieces of evidence are treated in a narrative framework sheds light on why Holmes is not concerned with simplicity and warns against any kind of prejudice (including some notion of probability prompted by previously observed regularities): they do not fit the logic of narrative explanation. But his preferences for subtle and bizarre constructions, as well as the search for unique features that do not fit with natural expectations, are consistent with looking at cases as if they had an inherent narrative structure.
Holmes’s narratives are thus typically scenarios of how things might have been. They are constructed from facts collected in the initial stage of the investigation, and even if they are rarely put forward explicitly, they guide the second stage of fact collecting from the background.
Accepting a scenario, only if tentatively, guides the second phase of fact collecting, which may result in rejecting or strengthening the initial scenario depending on what further facts are collected and how they are related to other facts already at hand. We can see now why Watson’s remarks are often helpful. His speculations, albeit typically mistaken, are useful in creating and eliminating possible, but untrue scenarios.
The Man with the Twisted Lip
The scenario before us, then, is that organizing facts into narrative patterns requires a set of values and sensitivities that are at odds with pure deduction. The resulting structure of facts and conclusions is a product of narrative imagination—a quality Holmes finds conspicuously missing in inspectors Lestrade and Gregory (“The Norwood Builder,” “Silver Blaze”)—and not of abductive reason. Abductive inference plays an important role in exploring the possible implications of facts, but not in creating scenarios of how those facts and implications may hang together. The most important work, we might say with Holmes, is done with “the scientific use of the imagination, but we have always some material basis on which to start our speculation” (The Hound of the Baskervilles).