Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy by Steiff Josef

Author:Steiff, Josef [Steiff, Josef]
Language: ru
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780812697360
Publisher: Perseus Books Group
Published: 2011-10-11T04:00:00+00:00

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.

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