Inducing Sherlock Holmes
Steven B. Zwickel
March, 2023
The first Sherlock Holmes’ mystery I read was “The Red-Headed League.”1 I was probably about 10 or 11 and I was immediately hooked. The idea of observing closely and paying attention to small details intrigued me.
I got so caught up in Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective’s adventures I hung up a sign on our front porch advertising myself as a “Public Detective.” (I wanted to serve the public, you see, and not just a few private people). When an older couple, misunderstanding my sign, came to the door to inquire about the space they thought was for rent, my folks made me take down the sign.
Sherlock’s methods never left me. I became, and continue to be, acutely aware of incongruities and anachronisms. I notice whenever I see something on TV or in a movie that is out of place or set in the wrong time. A scene that takes place at dawn should have long shadows. Shakespeare goofed when he had a clock strike the hour in ancient Rome. Since I come from a family of furniture makers, I know you shouldn’t see an art deco chair in a scene set in Colonial America.
Because I pay attention to details, I find the casting in most of the movies and TV shows about Sherlock Holmes annoying. Look up “Sherlock” and you will find that it means “fair haired” or blonde.2 However, every single actor who has portrayed the detective has had dark hair, with two exceptions. Peter Cushing in “The Hound Of The Baskervilles” (1959) was blonde and Michael Caine, who played Sherlock for laughs in “Without A Clue” (1988), was a brunette. Whoever cast Jeremy Brett, Basil Rathbone, and the rest either didn’t bother to find out what “Sherlock” means or decided to ignore it.
Sherlock is renowned for his powers of “deduction”, a term that bugs me, because deduction is the wrong way to describe what he does. Holmes examines a clue, then draws on his vast knowledge of the world3 to reach a conclusion about the meaning of that clue. This process—going from an understanding of the general to a particular example—is called induction.4 Scientific method—collecting and testing numerous samples to test a hypothesis to reach a conclusion about the world—is deduction.
When Holmes picks up a cigarette butt and compares it to his enormous collection of tobacco products, he is doing induction. I like the way he surprises people in the Doyle stories and on screen, most of whom are pretty oblivious, by “connecting the dots” and reaching a conclusion.
I like the fact that Holmes is so clever at recognizing patterns, not just of objects, but also patterns of behavior. He compares what he witnesses to his knowledge and draws a conclusion. I tried to emulate this skill as a mediator and when doing counseling. Everyone is different, of course, but there are definitely common patterns of behavior that can be detected in counseling. Often these are self-destructive behaviors, such as taking drugs or drinking. Once these behaviors are identified, they can become part of an effective counseling strategy. Holmes learns from experience and applies what he learns about the world and about people to each case.
As a college professor a lot of my energy went into trying to understand how people learn. Years ago I was asked to put together a short program for new teaching assistants (TAs). These were graduate students in the college of engineering who were going to be working as instructors of undergrads. I put together a variety of some two dozen items that were not easily identifiable and set them out on paper plates. Each plate had a number.
I told the new teaching assistants to walk around the table, examine each item, and write down the number on the plate and what they thought the item was.
When they had completed their lists, I had each TA tell me about an item. Sometimes they were completely stumped, but if they got it right, I asked them “How do you know what that is?” and I kept track of their answers on the chalkboard.
Almost every answer was “Because I’ve seen one before” and almost no one said “Because I read about it in a book.” The point was that book learning is fine, as far as it goes, but it is no substitute for real-world experience.
For grad students this exercise was an eye-opener. Grad students live in a world full of books and articles that they must read to master their fields. The exercise led into a lively discussion of how people learn and the value of combining academic learning with real-life experience, just like Sherlock Holmes.
The real lessons here are about learning to pay attention to the world around you. I see so many people walking around with their faces buried in their phones, oblivious to everything but their screens. They seem to live in a little electronic bubble and I wonder how they will ever be able to cope with reality. Even if they do look up, if they aren't attentive to their surroundings, they will remain ignorant of the world. As Sherlock would say, they see, but they don't observe.5
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3 “…Holmes demonstrates a working knowledge of: chemistry, bloodstain identification, botany, geology, anatomy, law, cryptanalysis, fingerprinting, document examination, ballistics, psychological profiling and forensic medicine.” <https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/sherlock-holmes-and-the-tools-of-deduction-10556242>
4 See <https://thedailycoach.substack.com/p/the-power-of-inductive-reasoning>
5 A recent article in the New York Times alerted me to the fact that inductive reasoning is what doctors do. They compare what they observe and what tests reveal to what they know and try to come up with a diagnosis. "For more than a century, doctors have been portrayed like detectives who gather clues and use them to find the culprit. But experienced doctors actually use a different method — pattern recognition — to figure out what is wrong. In medicine, it’s called an illness script: signs, symptoms and test results that doctors put together to tell a coherent story based on similar cases they know about or have seen themselves. If the illness script doesn’t help, Dr. Rodman said, doctors turn to other strategies, like assigning probabilities to various diagnoses that might fit." - Gina Kolata "A Mystery in the E.R.? Ask Dr. Chatbot for a Diagnosis. (July 22, 2023 The New York Times) <https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/22/health/chatbot-medical-mystery-diagnosis.html>
And, of course, there was the TV show "House", in which a doctor used inductive reasoning to diagnose difficult cases. It's no coincidence that Dr. House's name resembled Sherlock Holmes'!
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