Enjoyable Conjecture
I am delighted that someone has raised the Holmes issue and offered occasion for three related thoughts.
- I have several times proposed that the approach to terrorists would be improved if we made Holmes the model for it. What this means to me is that we would not leap to conclusions and apply massive force. We would search out the needles in the haystack, as our premier whistleblower has suggested. We would be open as Holmes was to reasoning out an effective approach that did not bleed over into all sorts of collateral damage of the sort that seems to reflect the hapless MO of our present effort.
2. Your article prods me to wonder whether what I am proposing is more than simply using your head. Might Holmes have examined all the evidence and concluded that the well-spring of terrorism has been mainly … us? That we had the evidence all along?
3. As to the matter of induction and deduction, I tend to rest with Charles Sanders Peirce, who observed in Ms. 692, 26–7, “That neither deduction nor induction can ever add the smallest item to the data of perception; and, as we have already noticed, mere percepts do not constitute any knowledge applicable to any practical or theoretical use. All that makes knowledge applicable comes to us via abduction. Looking out my window this lovely spring morning I see an azalea in full bloom. No, no! I do not see that; though that is the only way I can describe what I see. That is a proposition, a sentence, a fact; but what I perceive is not proposition, sentence, fact, but only an image, which I make intelligible in part by means of a statement of fact. This statement is abstract; but what I see is concrete. I perform an abduction when I so much as express in a sentence anything I see. The truth is that the whole fabric of our knowledge is one matted felt of pure hypothesis confirmed and refined by induction. Not the smallest advance can be made in knowledge beyond the stage of vacant staring, without making an abduction at every step.”
I guess (sic) the moral is, When in doubt, settle for abduction. Assume fallibility. And trust continuity.
