The Sherlock Holmes Law

I rather like Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. I should also admit that I’m not a hard-core devotee of mysteries in general. If I were, I probably would find the frequent plot holes in the Holmes corpus more annoying than I do. I enjoy them mostly for the period atmosphere, the prickly character of Holmes himself, and the buddy-show dynamic of his relationship with Doctor Watson. To be honest, I’ve actually enjoyed the old BBC Holmes series with Jeremy Brett at least as much as I have enjoyed reading the original works. There’s more of the color, more of the banter, and less scolding of Watson (and implicitly the reader) for not observing the one detail in a million that will somehow eventually prove relevant.

Irrespective of form, though, the Holmes stories have helped me articulate a principle I like to call the “Sherlock Holmes Law”, which relates to the presentation of fictional characters in any context. In its simplest form, it’s merely this:

A fictional character can think no thought that the author cannot.

This is so obvious that one can easily overlook it, and in most fiction it rarely poses a problem. Most authors are reasonably intelligent — most of the ones who actually see publication, at least — and they can create reasonably intelligent characters without breaking the credibility bank. 

There are of course some ways for authors to make characters who are practically superior to themselves. Almost any writer can extrapolate from his or her own skills to create a character who can perform the same tasks faster or more accurately. Hence though my own grasp of calculus is exceedingly slight, and my ability to work with the little I do know is glacially slow, I could write about someone who can look at an arch and mentally calculate the area under the curve in an instant. I know that this is something one can theoretically do with calculus, even if I’m not able to do it myself. There are well-defined inputs and outputs. The impressive thing about the character is mostly in his speed or accuracy. 

This is true for the same reason that you don’t have to be a world-class archer to describe a Robin Hood who can hit the left eye of a gnat from a hundred yards. It’s just another implausible extrapolation from a known ability. As long as nobody questions it, it will sell at least in the marketplace of entertainment. Winning genuine credence might require a bit more.

Genuinely different kinds of thinking, though, are something else. 

I refer this principle to the Holmes stories because, though Mr. Holmes is almost by definition the most luminous intellect on the planet, he’s really not any smarter than Arthur Conan Doyle, save in the quantitative sense I just described. Doyle was not a stupid man, to be sure (though he was more than a little credulous — apparently he believed in fairies, based on some clearly doctored photographs). But neither was he one of the rare intellects for the ages. And so while Doyle may repeatedly assure us (through Watson, who is more or less equivalent to Doyle himself in both training and intelligence) that Holmes is brilliant, what he offers as evidence boils down to his ability to do two things. He can:

a) observe things very minutely (even implausibly so);

and

b) draw conclusions from those observations with lightning speed. That such inferences themselves strain logic rather badly is not really the point: Doyle has the writer’s privilege of guaranteeing by fiat that they will turn out to be correct.

Time, of course, is one of those things for which an author has a lot of latitude, since books are not necessarily (or ever, one imagines) written in real time. Even if it takes Holmes only a few seconds to work out a chain of reasoning, it’s likely that Doyle himself put much more time into its formation. While that probably does suggest a higher-powered brain, it still doesn’t push into any genuinely new territory. Put in computer terms, while a hypothetical Z80 chip running at a clock speed of 400Mhz would be a hundred times faster than the 4Mhz one that powered my first computer back in the 1982, it would not be able to perform any genuinely new operations. It would probably be best for running CP/M on a 64K system — just doing so really quickly.

It’s worth noting that sometimes what manifests itself chiefly as an increase in speed actually does represent a new kind of thinking. There is a (perhaps apocryphal) story about Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855), who, when he was still in school, was told to add the digits from one to a hundred as punishment for some classroom infraction or other. As the story goes, he thought about it for a second or two, and then produced the correct result (5050), much to the amazement of his teacher. Gauss had achieved his answer not by adding all those numbers very rapidly, but by realizing that if one paired and added the numbers at the ends of the sequence, moving in toward the center, one would always get 101: i.e., 100 + 1 = 101; 99 + 2 = 101; and so on. There would then be fifty such pairs — hence 50 x 101: 5050. 

A character cannot produce that kind of idea if the author doesn’t understand it first. It makes the depiction of superintelligent characters very tricky, and sometimes may even limit the portrayal of stupid ones who don’t think the way the rest of us do.

For readers, however, it is different. Literary works (fictional or not) can open up genuinely new kinds of ideas to readers. While a writer who has achieved a completely new way of thinking about some technical problem is less likely to expound it in fiction than in some sort of a treatise or an application with the patent office, fictional works often present ideas one has never considered before in the human arena. It need not be a thought that’s new to the world in order to be of value — it needs merely to be new to you.

Such a thought, no matter how simple it may seem once you see it, can blow away the confines of our imaginations. It’s happened to me at a few different stages in my life. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings awakened me when I was a teenager to something profound about the nature of language and memory. C. S. Lewis’ “The Weight of Glory” revolutionized the way I thought about other people. Tolstoy’s War and Peace laid to rest any notion I had that other people’s minds (or even my own) could ever be fully mapped. Aquinas’ Summa Theologica (especially Q. 1.1.10) transformed forever my apprehension of scripture. The list goes on, but it’s not my point to catalogue it completely here.

Where has that happened to you?