Just recently I watched a program on TV called “How Sherlock Holmes Changed the
World”.
As I am sure everyone knows, the world renown detective from 221B Baker St. was written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In his books Holmes, who lived in the 1880 England, was a master of Deductive Reason and attention to detail.. Logical Reasoning has two components Deductive Reasoning, which is looking at parts of an object to decide what it is, and Inductive Reasoning, which is looking at the object and figuring what parts it should have.. To some degree this is subconscious and done automatically in that we first use Deductive Reasoning to, for example, decide that an object is a car and this the mind applies Inductive Reasoning to verify that it is indeed a car..
Sherlock was indeed ahead of his time.. He had his own forensic laboratory in the 1880.. The first one in America was when the FBI got theirs running in 1930s.
Sherlock further uses his intimate knowledge to correct Inspector Lastrade when he jumps to improper conclusions based on his having developed a theory before the facts were clear..
Yes, he did help change the world of Law Enforcement and this brings me to another
person who could also have a impact on Deductive Reasoning..
Several months ago I wrote a piece about a Deputy U.S. Marshal Matt Wiggin.. It seem that they had a tip, from an informant, about a person wanted for incestual rape. The person was said to be in the area of a housing cluster. As Deputy Marshal Wiggins, and his group of Marshal and Sarasota City Police, began a door to door search Deputy Wiggen came to the kitchen window of Louise Goldsberry, a nurse at Doctor’s Hospital. This is where he made a deductive leap, equal to any made by Inspector Lastrade, to believe that he had reasonable cause to believe the fugitive was located in that apartment… when the nurse, who was at the kitchen sink doing dishes looked up to see a strange man pointing a weapon at her through the window, it had one of those little red laser sights, she proved, to him, that she was hiding something by ducking out of sight, and going to get a weapon of her own… This was how, after her guilty display of survival instinct, they would have an armed face off when he, knowing she was hiding a fugitive, would open her door and enter. There was no fugitive and she had never heard of the man.
It is from the wisdom of Deputy U.S. Marshal Matt Wiggins that we have leaned several facts. If you ever see a foul mouth man aiming a weapon at you through a window, or door, and cursing you.. Don’t give into survival instincts and duck as that will prove to the Law Enforcement officers that you have something to hide…. and that, given the impeccable nature of these deduction, a search warrant is no longer needed..
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