Why They Might Deceive Us.
Saint Augustine (De Mendacio, pp. 8688) was the first philosopher to explicitly cla.s.sify different types of deception. In particular, he categorized various kinds of lying based on the purpose for which it is done. For instance, there are lies that harm someone and help no one, lies that harm someone and help someone else, lies that harm no one and help someone, and lies told "solely for the pleasure of lying." However, this taxonomy is not very helpful when it comes to cla.s.sifying deception in the Sherlock Holmes stories (a.k.a. the "Canon").
There may be a few lies in the Canon that harm no one and help someone. In "The Adventure of the Second Stain," Holmes is asked by the Secretary for European Affairs to retrieve a sensitive doc.u.ment that has been stolen from his "despatch-box." Holmes discovers that the doc.u.ment has been removed by the Secretary"s own wife. But instead of exposing her, he secretly replaces the doc.u.ment in the despatch-box and tells the Secretary, "the more I think of the matter the more convinced I am that the letter has never left this house."
Since the doc.u.ment is safe, the lie arguably does no harm and it saves the wife from potentially losing her husband. But almost all of the examples of deception that Watson records fall into the category of helping the deceiver and harming someone else. In fact, even the lie in "The Adventure of the Second Stain" ends up making the Right Honourable Trelawney Hope look a bit foolish for having thought that the doc.u.ment was stolen in the first place.
But fortunately, there is a more useful way to cla.s.sify the deceptions in the Canon according to their purpose. Most notably, criminals use deception to conceal who committed the crime. For instance, Colonel Valentine Walter and Hugo Oberstein steal the "Bruce-Partington Plans." But they kill the junior clerk at Woolwich a.r.s.enal and plant several of the doc.u.ments on his body to make it look as if he was the thief.
Criminals sometimes attempt to hide the fact that a crime has been committed at all. In "The Adventure of the Speckled Band," Dr. Grimesby Roylott of Stoke Moran kills his step-daughter so that she cannot get married, and he does so in a way that conceals the fact that she was murdered. (As we"ll see below, there"s a veritable epidemic of parents in Victorian England who are willing to take extreme measures to keep their daughters from getting married.) He sends a venomous snake down a bellrope into her locked bedroom to bite her, which leaves no visible evidence of foul play.
But in addition to covering up the crime, criminals also use deception to commit the crime in the first place. Most notably, Vincent Spaulding (a.k.a. John Clay) deceives Jabez Wilson about there being a "vacancy on the League of the Red-headed Men." The ruse keeps Wilson out of his p.a.w.nshop for several hours a day so that Clay and his accomplice can dig a tunnel into the vault of the neighboring City and Suburban Bank.
In "The Adventure of the Norwood Builder," Jonas Oldacre plants false evidence to suggest that he has been murdered by the unhappy John Hector McFarlane. He uses a little of his own blood, and McFarlane"s thumbprint from a wax seal on an envelope, to place a b.l.o.o.d.y thumbprint on the wall.
Some of Holmes"s own clients try to deceive him simply to avoid embarra.s.sment. In "The Problem of Thor Bridge," Mr. Neil Gibson tries to deceive Holmes about the nature of his relationship with the governess of his children (at least until Holmes accuses him of lying). Dr. Gregory House, a fictional medical detective who is loosely based on Sherlock Holmes (see Jerold Abrams, "The Logic of Guesswork in Sherlock Holmes and House"), has the same sort of problem. ("I don"t ask why patients lie, I just a.s.sume they all do.") In fact, Holmes explicitly draws the a.n.a.logy between a client lying to him and a patient lying to a doctor. ("And it is only a patient who has an object in deceiving his surgeon who would conceal the facts of his case.") Holmes himself regularly uses deceit in order to solve the crime. In "A Scandal in Bohemia," Watson throws a "plumber"s smoke-rocket" through a window so that Irene Adler will think that there is a fire and will reveal the location of the indiscreet photograph that Holmes has been engaged to retrieve. In "The Adventure of the Empty House," Holmes puts a wax bust of himself in the window of 221B Baker Street to convince Colonel Sebastian Moran "that I was there when I was really elsewhere." In "The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone," Holmes does the exact opposite. He pretends to be a wax replica of himself so that Count Negretto Sylvius will think that he is elsewhere when he is really there.
Holmes even goes so far as to fake his own death at the Reichenbach Falls to protect himself from the Moriarty gang ("The Adventure of the Empty House"). The "tragedy" at the falls occurred before the "Norwood Builder" faked his own death. But Holmes might have gotten the idea from John Douglas in The Valley of Fear. In addition to faking his own death, Douglas (while working as a Pinkerton in America) was a counterfeit counterfeiter ("I never minted a dollar in my life. Those I gave you were as good as any others").
Holmes often deceives Watson as well as the criminals he"s chasing. Just like the rest of the world, Watson is completely convinced that Holmes died with Moriarty at that "fearful place." And, as if Watson had not already suffered enough grief, Holmes later persuades him that he (Holmes) is dying of a rare tropical disease ("The Adventure of the Dying Detective"). But Holmes usually only deceives Watson as a means of deceiving the criminals that he"s chasing. For instance, Watson had to believe that Holmes was dead because "it is quite certain that you would not have written so convincing an account of my unhappy end had you not yourself thought that it was true."
It"s not completely clear why Holmes needs to maintain this fiction for three years. After all, a "confederate" of Moriarty was a "witness of his friend"s death and of my escape." Holmes has a much better excuse for deceiving Watson in "The Adventure of the Dying Detective." He wants Watson to fetch Mr. Culverton Smith ("the man upon earth who is best versed in this disease") and, as he later explains to Watson, "if you had shared my secret you would never have been able to impress Smith with the urgent necessity of his presence, which was the vital point of the whole scheme."
As the great German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche pointed out just a few years before Holmes supposedly fell into that awful abyss, "men believe in the truth of that which is plainly strongly believed."
And finally, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself engages in deception. He"s always trying to deceive his readers about what"s really going on, until Holmes reveals the solution to the mystery. As Doyle explains in his autobiography, "having got that key idea, one"s next task is to conceal it and lay emphasis upon everything which can make for a different explanation." In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Doyle provides us with several possible suspects. In addition to being the butler (always a suspicious character in murder mysteries), Mr. Barrymore has "a full, black beard" just like the man that followed Sir Henry Baskerville in London and he could have the motive of keeping Baskerville Hall for himself. The escaped convict Selden, the Notting Hill murderer, is loose on the moor and is "a man that would stick at nothing." There is also the suspicious, unidentified "man on the tor" that Watson sees silhouetted against the moon (who turns out to be Holmes himself). Or the curse of the Baskervilles could actually be true and there is a "hound of h.e.l.l" roaming the moor.
How They Might Deceive Us.
It"s useful to know about the different reasons why people deceive. This can make us more aware that a person might have a motivation to deceive us. But it"s even more important to understand how people deceive. According to J. Bowyer Bell and Barton Whaley and to Paul Ekman, there are two main ways to deceive. You can "hide the truth" or you can "show the false." For instance, Dr. Roylott just hides the truth that he murdered his step-daughter. By contrast, Colonel Walter and Oberstein show the false that Cadogan West stole the plans for the submarine (as well as hiding the truth that they did it).
Either way, the ultimate goal is the same. As several philosophers have pointed out, in order for something to count as deception, the goal must be to foster in someone a false belief, or at least to lower that person"s confidence in a true belief. For instance, Dr. Roylott wants people to believe that his stepdaughter was not murdered and Colonel Walter and Oberstein want people to believe that West stole the plans.
Admittedly, it"s possible to hide the truth from someone just in order to "keep him in the dark." I might steal the latest copy of Variety from your mailbox so that you will not learn that the new Sherlock Holmes film is going to be written by the guy that accused George Costanza of double dipping. However, with only a few exceptions, philosophers don"t count this as deception. Similarly, Holmes is not deceiving anyone when he keeps his chain of reasoning secret. As he explains to Watson in A Study in Scarlet, "I"m not going to tell you much more of the case, Doctor. You know a conjuror gets no credit when once he has explained his trick, and if I show you too much of my method of working, you will come to the conclusion that I am a very ordinary individual after all." When the same issue comes up in "The Red-Headed League," Holmes quotes the Roman historian Tacitus, "Omne ignotum pro magnifico" (Everything unknown appears magnificent). Likewise, the "cipher messages" used in "The Adventure of the Dancing Men" and in The Valley of Fear are not intended to deceive. They are simply designed to keep everyone but the intended recipient ignorant of the contents of the message.
A Master of Disguise.
As Bell and Whaley have pointed out, there are several different techniques for hiding the truth and showing the false. These techniques can be ill.u.s.trated by looking at the various ways that disguises function in the Canon.
Several of the villains that Holmes chases down disguise themselves. Most notably, Mr. Neville St. Clair becomes "The Man with the Twisted Lip" because he could make more money as a professional beggar than as a journalist. In "A Case of Ident.i.ty," James Windibank "disguised himself, covered those keen eyes with tinted gla.s.ses, masked the face with a moustache and a pair of bushy whiskers, sunk that clear voice into an insinuating whisper, and doubly secure on account of the girl"s short sight, he appears as Mr. Hosmer Angel, and keeps off other lovers by making love himself."
Sometimes criminals even disguise other people. Mr. and Mrs. Rucastle of the "Copper Beeches" make their governess (without her knowledge) appear to be their daughter. The goal is to convince the daughter"s fiance that she"s no longer interested in him. In fact, criminals sometimes disguise animals. Silas Brown dyed the distinctive white forehead of "Silver Blaze" so that he would blend in with the other horses at Mapleton.
And as we all know, Holmes himself is a master of disguise. He often pretends to be a member of the working cla.s.s so that he can conduct his investigations with greater anonymity. He appears as a "rakish young workman" ("The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton"), a "mariner who had fallen into years and poverty" (The Sign of the Four), a "drunken-looking groom" ("A Scandal in Bohemia"), an "ill-dressed vagabond" ("The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet"), and a "doddering, loose-lipped" opium fiend ("The Man with the Twisted Lip"). And he has set up various locations around London where he can change into these disguises ("The Adventure of Black Peter"). Unlike Clark Kent, Holmes cannot just hop into the nearest phone booth to change his ident.i.ty.
According to Sherlock Holmes in "The Great Game" (from the first season of Sherlock with Benedict c.u.mberbatch), "the art of disguise is knowing how to hide in plain sight." But hiding the truth is not the only possible goal of putting on a disguise. Disguises can also be used to show the false in several different ways. In addition, there are actually several different ways to hide the truth with a disguise.
Hiding in Plain Sight.
One way that disguises can hide the truth is called masking (or camouflage). This is when the person or the thing disguised is not intended to be seen at all. A prime example is a chameleon changing its color to blend in with the surrounding environment. Similarly, a criminal might use the thick London fog to hide himself. As Holmes explains to Watson, "See how the figures loom up, are dimly seen, and then blend once more into the cloudbank. The thief or the murderer could roam London on such a day as the tiger does the jungle, unseen until he pounces, and then evident only to his victim" ("The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans").
Holmes himself is really good at this technique. In "The Adventure of the Devil"s Foot," when Holmes tells Dr. Leon Sterndale that he was followed, Sterndale says, "I saw no one," to which Holmes replies, "That is what you may expect to see when I follow you." As Holmes explains in the Jeremy Brett adaptation of "The Man with the Twisted Lip," the goal is to "merge with the surroundings." The murderer in A Study in Scarlet is quite good at it too. When he"s finally caught, he says to Holmes (in the Benedict c.u.mberbatch adaptation), "See, no one ever thinks about the cabbie. It"s like you"re invisible. Just the back of a head. Proper advantage for a serial killer."
Another way that disguises can hide the truth is called repackaging. This is when the person or the thing disguised is made to look like something else. For instance, several species of insects have evolved to look like sticks or leaves. In a similar vein, "Silver Blaze" is made to look like just any other horse. Unlike with masking, this is not an attempt to keep people from seeing the disguised item, but just to keep them from recognizing it for what it is.
The most famous example of this technique from detective fiction is The Purloined Letter. The stolen letter was made to look like a different letter and then hidden by the thief in plain sight. While the ruse fools the Parisian police, the letter is discovered by Edgar Allan Poe"s C. Auguste Dupin. I"m somewhat hesitant to bring up this example as Holmes thought that "Dupin was a very inferior fellow" (A Study in Scarlet). Dupin had a confederate create a commotion to distract the villain, so that he could recover the purloined letter. Despite Holmes"s disdain for his French counterpart, this event may have inspired Holmes"s attempt to trick Irene Adler.
Disguises are often a combination of these two techniques. Frequently, something (or someone) is disguised with the hope that no one will even notice it (masking). However, the disguise is such that, if someone does notice it, she will not recognize it for what it really is (repackaging). This is probably what the murderous cabbie really had in mind. Similarly, in "The Final Problem" and "The Adventure of the Empty House," Holmes disguises himself as an Italian priest and as an "elderly deformed" book collector so that the Moriarty gang will not notice him at all. But if they do notice him, as they probably do when Watson b.u.mps into him and upsets his books, they are unlikely to recognize him as the famous consulting detective.
Finally, dazzling is yet another way to hide the truth. When pursuers know that a particular person or thing is in a particular location, masking and repackaging are not going to be effective techniques. However, it"s still possible to confound the pursuers. An octopus might shoot out ink to confuse a predator and escape. Similarly, law firms sometimes provide boxes and boxes of doc.u.ments so that the opposition will not be able to find the one incriminating doc.u.ment in the "haystack."
Since we don"t know "the whole story concerning the politician, the lighthouse, and the trained cormorant" ("The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger") or the "story for which the world is not yet prepared" about "the giant rat of Sumatra" ("The Adventure of the Suss.e.x Vampire"), I cannot say for sure whether or not Holmes ever faced dazzling. But the readers of the Holmes stories certainly have. Doyle himself was engaged in dazzling when he pointed to multiple false explanations of the crime as he did in The Hound of the Baskervilles. With several possible suspects in each of her mysteries, Agatha Christie is the queen of this technique.
Creating a False Impression.
In addition to hiding the true, disguises can also be used to show the false. One way that disguises can do this is called mimicking. This is when the person or the thing disguised is made to look like something else, not just to remain hidden, but to gain some other advantage. For instance, several species of cuckoo lay their eggs in the nests of other birds so that these other birds will raise them (believing them to be their own offspring). Similarly, when Mr. Windibank pretends to be his stepdaughter"s young suitor, he certainly wants to hide his true ident.i.ty, but it is equally important that he display his false ident.i.ty to her.
It"s possible to mimic a type of person, as when Neville St. Clair disguises himself as a beggar. And it is also possible to mimic a particular person as when the Rucastles" governess is made to appear to be their daughter. In addition, mimicry does not always involve a disguise per se. For instance, the b.l.o.o.d.y thumbprint that Oldacre created "mimicked" an actual b.l.o.o.d.y thumbprint left by McFarlane.
Another way that disguises can show the false is called inventing. This is just like mimicking except that something (or someone) is disguised as something else that never existed before. In other words, a new reality is created. A good example of this is The Hound of the Baskervilles itself. As Watson describes it, A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen. Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flame. Never in the delirious dream of a disordered brain could anything more savage, more appalling, more h.e.l.lish be conceived than that dark form and savage face which broke upon us out of the wall of fog.
However, Jack Stapleton had simply painted a large hound with phosphorus to make it appear to be a "hound of h.e.l.l."
Finally, decoying is yet another way to show the false. A bird will sometimes lure predators away from its nest by pretending that it has a broken wing. In A Study in Scarlet, when the murderer (who was an American and not a German) wrote the German word for revenge in blood on the wall, "it was simply a ruse to divert inquiry into a wrong channel." And in "The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter," Dr. Leslie Armstrong literally leaves a false trail for Holmes. He leaves home in his brougham in the opposite direction from his true destination and then he doubles back. In other words, he "disguises" his destination.
Decoying can certainly involve showing the false. Pretending to have a broken wing is actually a type of mimicking. Also, decoying can be carried out by inventing. But despite the fact that Bell and Whaley cla.s.sify decoying as a type of showing the false, the ultimate goal is to hide the truth. Moreover, it can be carried out without showing the false at all. For example, if the bird actually does have a broken wing, it can still lure predators away from its nest.
By the way, according to Holmes, Stapleton used his wife, who was pretending to be his sister, as a "decoy" in The Hound of the Baskervilles. But this was not decoying in the sense that Bell and Whaley have in mind. Stapleton "hoped that his wife might lure Sir Charles to his ruin" rather than away from anything. In other words, he was using her in the way that a hunter uses a decoy duck. So, this is just another case of mimicking.
Deceived by Words.
The princ.i.p.al distinction drawn by philosophers is between lying and other forms of deception. For instance, in The Valley of Fear, Cecil Barker told "a great, big, thumping, obtrusive, uncompromising lie" about the shooting at Birlstone. By contrast, Jonas Oldacre merely planted false evidence to frame John Hector McFarlane. He did not actually say anything false. Of course, prevaricators typically engage in both verbal and nonverbal deception. For instance, Barker also planted a "smudge of blood like the mark of a boot-sole upon the wooden sill." And when he is finally caught, Oldacre does lie about his motivations. He claims that "it was only my practical joke."
This distinction is important, as several philosophers have argued, because all other things being equal, lying is worse than other forms of deception. Most notably, the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that, while it is always wrong to lie, it is sometimes okay to deceive in other ways.3 But this distinction is also important for the epistemological questions of how people are deceived and how deception can be detected.
If it becomes known that a piece of evidence has been placed somewhere intentionally, it is immediately suspect. Since it was not there the first time that he searched Oldacre"s house, Holmes knew that the b.l.o.o.d.y thumbprint must have been put there on purpose by someone other than John Hector McFarlane. In other cases, he is able to rule out the possibility that a clue has been left intentionally. For instance, in "The Problem of Thor Bridge," the note from the governess is clutched so tightly in Mrs. Gibson"s hand that "it excludes the idea that anyone could have placed the note there after death in order to furnish a false clue."
As Harvard philosopher Richard (a.k.a. "The Colonel") Moran points out, "ordinarily, if I confront something as evidence (the telltale footprint, the cigarette b.u.t.t left in the ashtray) and then learn that it was left there deliberately, even with the intention of bringing me to a particular belief, this will only discredit it as evidence in my eyes. It won"t seem better evidence, or even just as good, but instead like something fraudulent, or tainted evidence."
However, things work differently when someone deceives us by telling us something false. When someone tells us something, it"s always clear that she"s doing so on purpose. In fact, we believe what someone tells us precisely because she explicitly offers her a.s.surance that what she says is true. So, some indication other than the intentionality of the act is needed to cast doubt on the veracity of testimony.
Infernal Lies.
What exactly is a lie? According to most philosophers, a lie is a false statement that is intended to deceive someone. But a false statement is still a lie even if it does not succeed in deceiving that someone. In particular, Holmes is rarely taken in by the lies that he"s told. For instance, he can tell immediately that what Barker says to the police "is a clumsy fabrication which simply could not be true." In "The Final Problem," Holmes saw that "the letter from Meiringen was a hoax." And in "The Adventure of the Three Garridebs," after a visit from the conman John Garrideb (a.k.a. James Winter), Holmes asks, "I was wondering, Watson, what on earth could be the object of this man in telling us such a rigmarole of lies."
But it must be conceded that even Holmes is occasionally fooled by deceivers. For instance, in "The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge," Inspector Baynes arrests Mr. Aloysius Garcia"s cook for his murder. Although the inspector"s real suspect is Mr. Henderson of High Gable (a.k.a. Don Murillo, the Tiger of San Pedro), he "arrested the wrong man to make him believe that our eyes were off him." And his ruse fools Holmes as well as his suspect.
In addition to showing that Holmes is fallible, this case ill.u.s.trates an interesting fact about lying. In most cases, a liar intends to deceive his audience about what he is saying. For instance, Barker intends the police to believe that the shooting at Birlstone occurred just as he describes it. But as James Mahon points out in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a liar may intend to deceive about his believing what he is saying rather than about what he is saying. Baynes does not expect or intend Holmes or Don Murillo to believe that the cook is the murderer. After all, both Holmes and Don Murillo know full well that the cook is innocent. But Baynes does convince them that he thinks that the cook is the murderer. In fact, Holmes used this sort of technique himself. For instance, he is tempted to confront John Garrideb about his lies because "there are times when a brutal frontal attack is the best policy-but I judged it better to let him think he had fooled us."
But a few philosophers, such as Thomas Carson and Roy Sorensen, claim that some lies are not intended to deceive at all. In fact, bald-faced lies are told with complete seriousness even though everyone knows that the speaker is insincere. When Dr. Armstrong catches Holmes following him on a bicycle, he walks back and says that "he hoped his carriage did not impede the pa.s.sage of my bicycle" on the narrow road. Both of them know quite well that Holmes was not trying to pa.s.s the carriage and that Armstrong would not have cared if he were in the way. Although Holmes is not at all misled, the comment serves its purpose. Since he is not willing to admit that he was following Armstrong, Holmes has to continue along past the carriage and he loses Armstrong that day. As Indiana University philosopher Marcia Baron points out, lies can manipulate even when they do not deceive.
But in order to lie, one does have to intentionally say something false. In his search for the "Bruce-Partington Plans," Holmes interviews the clerk at Woolwich Station. And in the Jeremy Brett adaptation, the clerk says, "I was saying to the wife only on Sunday night. No, I"m a liar. It was Sat.u.r.day. I said, there is no safer railway than the London Metropolitan." However, the clerk was not lying, strictly speaking. He was only misspeaking because he did not intend to say something false.
I Didn"t Say So, Mr. Holmes.
Lying is not the only form of verbal deception that is intended to deceive. Philosophers agree that, in order to lie, you have to say something false (or at least something that you believe to be false). But as Adler points out in "Lying, Deceiving, or Falsely Implicating," you can also deceive by saying something true. Strictly speaking, Inspector Baynes"s deception was a false implicature rather than a lie. When Holmes asks him if he thinks that he has evidence that the cook is guilty, Baynes replies, "I didn"t say so, Mr. Holmes; I didn"t say so."
In "The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter," Holmes tells Lord Mount-James that "it is entirely possible that a gang of thieves have secured your nephew in order to gain from him some information as to your house, your habits, and your treasure." Now, it was certainly possible that the nephew was kidnapped. However, as Holmes admits to Watson, that theory "does not appeal to me as a very probable explanation. It struck me, however, as being the one which was most likely to interest that exceedingly unpleasant old person."
Of course, there are also many occasions on which Holmes tells outright lies. In addition to lying to Secretary Hope, he lies to a telegraph clerk about having sent a telegram so that he can get a look at the telegram that the "Missing Three-Quarter," G.o.dfrey Staunton, sent before he disappeared. In fact, in The Hound of the Baskervilles, he even lies to Watson about having to stay in London to work on a case of blackmailing. Thus, even if Kant is right that simply deceiving is not as bad as actually lying, it does not get Holmes off the hook.
You can also deceive simply by failing to say something. After solving "A Case of Ident.i.ty," Holmes does not tell his client Miss Mary Sutherland that her missing suitor was really her stepfather in disguise. His silence helps to ensure that she continues to believe falsely that he has not solved the mystery. It is what the great epistemologist Roderick Chisholm and his student Thomas Feehan call "deception by omission." As Tom Carson explains, "withholding information can const.i.tute deception if there is a clear expectation, promise, and/or professional obligation that such information will be provided." But since he does not actually say something that he believes to be false, such a "lie of omission" is not a lie, strictly speaking.
It"s a Conspiracy.
As well as ill.u.s.trating how we might be deceived, Holmes"s cases can teach us something about who might deceive us. Sometimes criminals work alone. For instance, Dr. Roylott kills his stepdaughter, and attempts to kill his other stepdaughter, all by himself. (That is, unless you count his swamp adder as a co-conspirator.) But more often than not, a small group of people carries out a crime, and then works to keep its nefarious activities secret. For instance, as Holmes notes, "Mrs. Douglas and Barker are both in a conspiracy to conceal something." Also, Mr. Windibank tries to keep hold of his stepdaughter"s money "with the connivance and a.s.sistance of his wife."
Moreover, it"s quite reasonable to believe that these conspiracies are responsible for bringing about the events that have been attributed to them. But many philosophers argue that it"s irrational to believe in most conspiracy theories. For instance, it"s clearly crazy to think that the Freemasons were behind the a.s.sa.s.sination of JFK or that water fluoridation is part of an Illuminati plot to take over the world. It would be almost miraculous that such undetected criminal conspiracies exist, yet no concrete evidence of their secret activities has come to light. Explaining away this lack of evidence requires extreme skepticism about many of our main sources of information about the world. The police and journalists would have to be incredibly incompetent, or they themselves would have to be involved in the conspiracy.
However, in at least one notable instance, this is precisely the sort of thing that Holmes, who "was pre-eminent in intelligence" ("The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter"), believes in. He thinks that Professor Moriarty "is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. . . . He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans. But his agents are numerous and splendidly organized" ("The Final Problem"). Among other crimes, Moriarty is responsible for the death of John Douglas in The Valley of Fear. Also, in the television adaptation with Jeremy Brett, he is really the mastermind behind The Red-Headed League.
Such conspiracies theories certainly have their attractions. They imply that things do not just happen at random, that human beings are able to control the course of events. Also, from what Watson tells us, Moriarty actually is "some deep organizing power which forever stands in the way of the law, and throws its shield over the wrong-doer." But is it reasonable for Holmes to believe that this is true?
According to Watson, "it will be within the memory of the public how completely the evidence which Holmes had acc.u.mulated exposed their organization" ("The Final Problem"). However, it is interesting that we only ever hear about two meager pieces of circ.u.mstantial evidence against Moriarty. First, he owns a painting by Jean Baptiste Greuze that he could not possibly afford on his "professor"s salary." Second, he writes checks on at least six different banks, which suggests to Holmes "that he wanted no gossip about his wealth. No single man should know what he had" (The Valley of Fear).
In fact, like most conspiracy theorists, Holmes even takes a lack of evidence to be evidence of the very existence of the conspiracy. He says to Watson, "Ay, there"s the genius and the wonder of the thing! . . . The man pervades London, and no one has heard of him" ("The Final Problem"). Moreover, Holmes has trouble convincing intelligent people about the threat of Moriarty. Inspector Alec MacDonald of Scotland Yard tells him, "I won"t conceal from you, Mr. Holmes, that we think in the C.I.D. that you have a wee bit of a bee in your bonnet over this professor. I made some inquiries myself about the matter. He seems to be a very respectable, learned, and talented sort of man" (The Valley of Fear). And even Watson wonders whether Holmes might sometimes suffer from some huge self-deception? Was it not possible that his nimble and speculative mind had built up this wild theory upon faulty premises? I had never known him to be wrong, and yet the keenest reasoner may occasionally be deceived. He was likely, I thought, to fall into error through the over-refinement of his logic-his preference for a subtle and bizarre explanation when a plainer and more commonplace one lay ready to his hand. (The Sign of the Four) This sort of deception is not the same as the interpersonal deception we"ve been discussing so far. Self-deception is usually not intentional. In fact, some philosophers argue that it is not even possible to intentionally deceive yourself.
In Holmes"s defense, he does have independent reasons to think that the police and journalists are incompetent. With regard to the police, Holmes notes that Gregson and Lestrade "are the pick of a bad lot" and that being "out of their depths . . . is their normal state" (A Study in Scarlet). And with regard to journalists, Holmes finds it easy to mislead them whenever he needs some false information to appear in the papers as he does in "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons" and in "The Adventure of the Ill.u.s.trious Client."
The press never seems to give Holmes sufficient credit for his successes. He remarks that "out of my last fifty-three cases my name has only appeared in four, and the police have had all the credit in forty-nine" ("The Adventure of the Naval Treaty"). This also may have to do with Holmes misleading them, as "nothing amused him more at the end of a successful case than to hand over the actual exposure to some orthodox official, and to listen with a mocking smile to the general chorus of misplaced congratulation" ("The Adventure of the Devil"s Foot").
Detecting Deception.
Holmes claims that "What one man can invent another can discover" ("The Adventure of the Dancing Men"). But exactly how do we go about detecting deception? These days, the most common technique is to use a polygraph, which monitors physiological indicators of stress, such as perspiration and increased blood pressure, that are a.s.sociated with lying. The polygraph was developed after Holmes retired to the south of England to keep bees. However, the technique that Holmes actually uses turns out to be even more effective than the polygraph.
Paul Ekman is a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco and is perhaps the greatest living expert on lying. He is also the inspiration for another fictional detective, Cal Lightman, from the television series Lie to Me. Ekman has trained himself and others to observe extremely short-lived facial expressions that reveal people"s emotions. And when these "microexpressions" do not fit with what a person is saying, it can be a very good indication of deceit.
In a similar vein, Holmes "claimed by a momentary expression, a twitch of a muscle or a glance of an eye, to fathom a man"s inmost thoughts. Deceit, according to him, was an impossibility in the case of one trained to observation and a.n.a.lysis" (A Study in Scarlet). In "The Adventure of the Norwood Builder," Holmes observes that Oldacre"s housekeeper, Mrs. Lexington, has "a sort of sulky defiance in her eyes, which only goes with guilty knowledge."
Also, in "The Resident Patient," he uses this technique to read Watson"s thoughts and then gives the following explanation: "The features are given to man as the means by which he shall express his emotions, and yours are faithful servants." "Do you mean to say you read my train of thoughts from my features?" "Your features and especially your eyes." This technique is so important that Holmes and Watson had exactly the same conversation twice. However, in "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box," the conversation takes place in August 1888 rather than October 1881. But any lie detection technique can be beaten. For instance, Professor Moriarty"s "soft, precise fashion of speech leaves a conviction of sincerity" ("The Final Problem").
But despite the power of this technique, Holmes does not usually discover that someone is lying to him because of what he observes in their features. Just like the rest of us, when he catches someone lying, it"s typically because what she says doesn"t fit with what he already knows or with what he later finds out. As Holmes puts it, "we must look for consistency. Where there is a want of it we must suspect deception" ("The Problem of Thor Bridge").
In "The Problem of Thor Bridge," Holmes figures out that someone is trying to deceive because it just does not make sense "that after carrying out so crafty a crime you would now ruin your reputation as a criminal by forgetting to fling your weapon into those adjacent reed-beds which would forever cover it, but you must needs carry it carefully home and put it in your own wardrobe, the very first place that would be searched." In a similar vein, regarding Cecil Barker"s story, "Consider! According to the story given to us, the a.s.sa.s.sin had less than a minute after the murder had been committed to take that ring, which was under another ring, from the dead man"s finger, to replace the other ring-a thing which he would surely never have done-and to put that singular card beside his victim. I say that this was obviously impossible."
Finally, regarding John Garrideb"s story, "Here is a man with an English coat frayed at the elbow and trousers bagged at the knee with a year"s wear, and yet by this doc.u.ment and by his own account he is a provincial American lately landed in London."
Useless Facts.
If we want to be able to detect deception, it"s important not to clutter our minds with a lot of other unimportant stuff. As Holmes tells Watson, "there comes a time when for every addition to knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones" (A Study in Scarlet).
About a hundred years later, the Princeton philosopher Gilbert Harman rediscovered this important fact about our cognitive economy. He said, there is a practical reason to avoid too much clutter in one"s beliefs. There is a limit to what one can remember, a limit to the number of things one can put into long-term storage, and a limit to what one can retrieve. It is important to save room for important things and not clutter one"s mind with a lot of unimportant matters.
At least in Billy Wilder"s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, it seems that Holmes has trouble following his own advice. He laments that "some of us are cursed with memories like flypaper, and stuck there is a staggering amount of miscellaneous data, mostly useless."
Yet it"s hard to say ahead of time which facts will turn out to be useful. In A Study in Scarlet, Holmes is not concerned that he does not know that "the earth travelled round the sun." However, such astronomical ignorance gets him into trouble in "The Great Game." It almost takes Holmes too long to recognize that a Vermeer is a fake because it depicts in the sky a supernova that did not appear until almost two hundred years after the painter"s death. As Holmes ironically admits in The Valley of Fear, "All knowledge comes useful to the detective," even a "trivial fact."
Wrapping Up the Case.
As we learn from Holmes, in order to avoid being deceived, we have to ask why someone might want to deceive us, how she might go about doing so, who she might be, and how we might detect the deception. Philosophers can help us to answer these questions by enumerating what the different possible answers are. And, as we have seen, the ill.u.s.trious career of the world"s first private "consulting detective" provides concrete examples of all these different types of deceit. In addition, studying these examples through the "powerful magnifying lens" of philosophy illuminates why Holmes was such a successful detective.
Although Watson claims in A Study in Scarlet that Holmes knew "next to nothing" about philosophy, he was certainly well-versed in the epistemology of deception. And once Holmes had retired to the south coast of England, Watson records in the preface to His Last Bow that "his time is divided between philosophy and agriculture."
Before most philosophers who have written about deception were even born, Holmes was well aware of the various different methods of deceiving people. Not only did he foil numerous criminals who tried to use these methods to "get away with murder," but he employed many of these methods himself. He was also ahead of his time in developing techniques for detecting deception (as with the use of "microexpressions"). And he probably would have beaten these philosophers into print on the varieties of deception if his planned "textbook, which shall focus the whole art of detection into one volume" had been published. But it must also be granted that his penchant for conspiracy theories may sometimes have led Holmes to see deception even when it was not really there.
I would like to thank Tony Doyle, Daniel Griffin, Sydney Johnson, Peter Lewis, Kay Mathiesen, and an audience at the School of Information Resources at the University of Arizona for many helpful suggestions on this chapter.
Chapter 17.
Watson"s a Liar!
Rory E. Kraft, Jr.
While this may be an odd place to start, I want to emphasize from the beginning that I am not one of those freaks who wanders around in a deerstalker hat, muttering things like "Elementary my dear Watson." Those poor people seem not to be able to separate fact from fiction. We find no mention of either the ridiculous hat or that silly line in the recognized John Watson memoirs (to which I add the two accounts penned by Holmes himself and the two stories we don"t know who wrote.) But like many, I dismiss the possibility that the Holmes stories were written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle was a failed physician and sometime spiritualist who also published works related to Atlantis and living dinosaurs in South America. It would be quite unreasonable to a.s.sume that he was able to "invent" the quite rational Holmes. Clearly Watson, in order to greater protect his own and Holmes"s ident.i.ties, used pseudonyms and utilized Doyle as a literary agent. It is worth noting in pa.s.sing that the famous address 221B Baker Street did not exist at the times of Holmes"s adventures, Baker Street then numbering only up to 100. This bit of misdirection is sufficient enough to show that just as their flat was obscured, so were Holmes and Watson"s real names.
To be clear however, just because Holmes did something is not a reason to follow along. I am unlikely to take up cocaine anytime soon, even if Sherlock believed the seven percent solution was "so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind" (The Sign of the Four).
In any event, I seem to have wandered away from my proper beginning point. Those of us who study Holmes do so for a simple reason: we seek truth. In these adventures we see not only good reasoning going on, but puzzles about the nature of reasoning, and puzzles about the nature of truth itself.
Do Not Trust Watson. Ever.
A central problem in reading the Holmes stories is that we"re generally being led by what literary types refer to as an untrustworthy narrator. Watson throughout the stories tells us that he has changed information in order to protect confidences. (For example, consider that we never learn in which college the "Adventure of the Three Students" occurs, because revealing this would be "injudicious and offensive.") Further, as some of the stories are recounted years after they occurred, based upon notes, and given Holmes"s desire not to have more accounts published, we find that many of them can be considered "carefully guarded" and "somewhat vague in certain details" ("Adventure of the Second Stain").
No doubt some of these omissions and changes were at Holmes"s request, as he believed that "Some facts should be suppressed, or, at least, a just sense of proportion should be observed in treating them" (The Sign of the Four).
Watson, however, a.s.sures us (in a comment to Holmes) that he "could not tamper with the truth" by leaving out the romantic elements of A Study in Scarlet. But it is just those romantic elements that cause us problems. Who exactly is the author of the Utahsection of the memoirs, and how did Watson come to integrate it into his work? Even if we grant that perhaps Watson shifted to a third-person narrator for these aspects he was not directly witnessing, we still have the problem of determining how he came to know these events, as Jefferson Hope died shortly after being arrested.
But even when it comes to aspects that need not be obscured, we find that Watson is less than reputable. Perhaps the most famous example of this is Watson"s wandering wound. We discover in the second paragraph of A Study in Scarlet that Watson was wounded while fighting in Afghanistan. He "was struck on the shoulder by a Jezail bullet, which shattered the bone and grazed the subclavian artery." But later in The Sign of the Four we find Watson nursing his wounded leg, which "had a Jezail bullet through it some time before" and "ached wearily at every change of the weather." While it is always possible that Watson was. .h.i.t through the leg, with the bullet then hitting the shoulder causing the other damage, I have yet to determine how anyone can contort himself such that a single bullet would travel in such a manner. Watson would have had to be folded in upon himself.
Nor is it likely that he would omit mentioning a larger (multishot) wound initially. Watson after all tells Holmes of his own pet dog, which never appears again in the stories. If something as minor as a quickly forgotten pet is mentioned at the outset, I a.s.sume that something as major as a double wound would have been acknowledged.
Even the casual reader of Holmes is likely to have heard of the struggles that some go through to properly date the various adventures. But few realize that given Watson"s fast and loose way with facts, even some of the most obvious clues are suspect. For example, we have ample evidence in A Study in Scarlet that Holmes and Watson met in 1881. Given that the conversation between Watson and Holmes on the nature of "deduction" (as explained in "The Book of Life") is closely followed by the appearance of Gregson"s note, most a.s.sume that the Drebber-Stangerson murders occurred in March of 1882. However, the notice in the Standard that Watson reprints in Chapter 6 of A Study in Scarlet clearly puts the murder as occurring on Tuesday, March 4th. The closest Tuesday, March 4th to the 1881 meeting is 1879, prior to their meeting. The next is in 1884. But we know that the "Adventure of the Speckled Band" occurs in April of 1883.