Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: clues and scientific method.

Sherlock Holmes on Reasoning

1. How I rediscovered Sherlock Holmes It was in the fall of 1987. This year, people all over the world celebrated the Centenary of Sherlock Holmes. Of course I knew who Sherlock Holmes was, since I had read several stories of Holmes during my high school days, and watched some TV programs on Holmes, afterward. But, actually, I did not know Holmes really well, because my memories were rather vag...

Sherlock Holmes: Father of Scientific Crime and Detection

Chemical Graph Theory and the Sherlock Holmes Principle

The development of chemical applications of graph theory is reviewed from a personal perspective. Graph-theoretical methods for finding all graphs fulfilling certain mathematical conditions followed by eliminating chemically impossible solutions are equivalent to the ‘Sherlock Holmes principle’. For molecular graphs, this is illustrated by monocyclic aromatic systems and by valence isomers of a...

Lewis on Meinongian Logic

In “Truth in Fiction,” David Lewis raises four objections to a Meinongian semantics of fiction. Lewis does not deny that a Meinongian logic of fiction could be made to work, but identifies disadvantages in Meinongian semantics as a reason for recommending his own possible worlds alternative. A Meinongian semantics proposes to explain meaning without ontological prejudice. It analyzes the meanin...

Models, Sherlock Holmes and the Emperor Claudius

Recently, a number of authors have suggested that we understand scientific models in the same way as fictional characters, like Sherlock Holmes. The biggest challenge for this approach concerns the ontology of fictional characters. I consider two responses to this challenge, given by Roman Frigg, Ronald Giere and Peter Godfrey-Smith, and argue that neither is successful. I then suggest an alter...