Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's private detective character, is often viewed as a prime (if fictional) example of critical and rational thought. But how rational is he when analyzed skeptically? Is his character an exemplery skeptic, merely adequate, or not at all? Are there other characters, contemporary or historical, that give him a run for Doyle's money?
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There's a very nice overview of some of his probabilistic reasoning skills at 'Sherlock Holmes and Probabilistic Induction', which is a paper presented for a Philosophy of Science Colloquium by Soshichi Uchii of Kyoto University, Japan. As it concludes: 'From all this, we can conclude that Sherlock Holmes knew well the new probabilistic theory of scientific reasoning, and applied it, as his own method, to his criminal investigations. Moreover, since the major advocates of this new theory were also an expert of symbolic logic, we may conclude, in all probability, that Holmes knew Boolean symbolic logic as well. On the total evidence, the balance of probability is that he was a very good logician.' If you are interested in the views of the author, Arthur Conan Doyle, however - I'd suggest looking up the his involvement in the history of the Cottingley Fairies hoax and his debates with well-known skeptic, Harry Houdini. There you'll find that there's somewhat a discrepancy between his much-admired character and his own personal beliefs about the likelihood of an afterlife/other world. |
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Tell you one thing, he didn't know what the word "deduction" actually meant; his methods were actually inductive and even abductive. |
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Well, I honestly have no quotes from other people that have studied Sherlock, I do believe that he is quite skeptical. I base this on the fact that he used methods that no other detective or officer was using at the time as well as some that went against the common police usages of the time. The author on the other hand is a different story. |
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