The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce - by Umberto Eco, Thomas Albert Sebeok et al

• about Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, and the philosopher Charles S Peirce.

partial excerpts

CONTENTS

PREFACE

The editors agree that this book has not been "programmed,"

Consider the following peculiar sequence of events: (1) In 1978, Sebeok casually told Eco that he and Jean Umiker-Sebeok are studying the "method" of Sherlock Holmes in the light of Peirce's logic. Eco answered that he was just then writing a lecture (which he eventually delivered, in November of that year, at the second International Colloquium on Poetics, organized by the Department of French and Romance Philology, at Columbia University), comparing the use of abductive methodology in Voltaire's Zadig with that of Holmes. Since both the undersigned were already incurably addicted to Peirce, this seeming coincidence was less than confounding.

Much to our regret, we also had to eliminate many other interesting materials dealing with the "method" of Holmes which did not take into account the logic of abduction

In the course of our researches, we both came to realize that every modern scholar interested in the logic of discovery has devoted at least a few lines, if not more, to Holmes.

Many works are still tied to the idea that Holmes's method hovered somewhere midway between deduction and induction. The idea of hypothesis or abduction is mentioned, if at all, only glancingly.

Obviously, not all the contributions to this book come to the same conclusions

The title of this book was meant to reverberate in two directions. There is the obvious referral (renvoi) to Doyle's novel-length chronicle, "The Sign of the Four,' or "The Sign of Four," which first appeared in Lippincott's magazine, later in book form, in 1819. Then there was our driving compulsion to send our readers back to the funhouse of rampant triplicities, such as are discussed in Sebeok's introductory three-card monte.

At the present time, the logic of scientific discoverythe phrase will, of course, be recognized as closely associated with Karl Popper has become a burning topic of focal concern for the theory of knowledge, pursued not only by Popper himself, but by his colleague, the late Imre Lakatos, and by Popper's erstwhile disciple, later his most ferocious critic, Paul Feyerabend.

Popper's controversial picture of science as a matter of "conjectures and refutations" - he holds, among other ideas, that induction is mythical, the scientific quest for certainty impossible, and all knowledge forever falliblewas substantially anticipated by Peirce

Critics of Popper, such as Thomas Kuhn and Anthony O'Hear, disagree with Popper on some of these fundamental issues

We are convinced that a semiotic approach to abduction can throw a new light on this venerable and continuing debate

CHAPTER ONE

One, Two, Three Spells U B E R T Y
(IN LIEU OF AN INTRODUCTION)
by Thomas Sebeok

IT IS A FAIR bet that while C.S. Peirce specialists have all at least thumbed through Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes chronicles, the mass of Holmes aficionados have never even heard of Peirce

Esperable uberty?

esperable, a coinageperhaps by Peirce himself, yet not to be found in any modern dictionarymust mean "expected" or "hoped for."

Uberty, a vocable that has all but vanished from modern English, was first attested, from 1412, in an obscure work by the "Monk of Bury,' John Lydgate's Two Merchants; it appears to be equivalent to "rich growth, fruitfulness, fertility; copiousness, abundance,' or, roughly, what Italians used to call ubertà.

In a long letter Peirce penned, early in the fall of 1913,

three canonical types of reasoning, to wit: deduction (deductive reasoning), induction (inductive reasoning), and abduction (abductive reasoning) (the latter term alternatively baptized retroduction or hypothetic inference).

deduction, "which depends on our confidence in our ability to analyze the meaning of the signs in or by which we think"; second, induction, "which depends upon our confidence that a run of one kind of experience will not be changed or cease without some indication before it ceases"; and, third, abduction, "which depends on our hope, sooner or later, to guess at the conditions under which a given kind of phenomenon will present itself"

Progressing from primity, through secundity, to tertiality, the relationship of security to uberty is an inverse one, which means, plainly, that as the certainty of any guess plummets, its heuristic merit soars correspondingly

Magic numbers and persuasive sounds," in William Congreve's measured phrase, especially three and numbers divisible by it, tormented some of the more brilliant Victorians

When Nikola Tesla started to walk around the block where his laboratory was situated, he felt compelled to circumambulate it three times

pursued the magic of triads with manic determination, beginning with the highest meaning of three, namely, the triliteral name of God in His own languag

Conan Doyle incorporated numbers in eight of his Holmes story titles

Three is mentioned no less than three times

the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, that "very inferior fellow," is the central figure in three (out of four, or five, if "Thou Art the Man" is counted among them) of Edgar Allan Poe's triptych tales of detection:

together dubbed by Jacques Derrida (1975) Poe's "Dupin Trilogy", and read by Jacques Lacan (1966:11-61) in terms of a set of repeated psychoanalytic structures of ''trois temps, ordonnant trois regards, supportés par trois sujets . .. . ," constituting a tracery like this

Peirce's fondness for introducing trichotomous analyses and classifications is notorious, as he knew only too well, and in defense of which he issued, in 1910, this beguiling apologia: The author's response to the anticipated suspicion that he attaches a superstitious or fanciful importance to the number three and forces divisions to a Procrustean bed of trichotomy.

CHAPTER TWO

"You Know My Method"
by Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok

A JUXTAPOSITION OF CHARLES S. PEIRCE AND SHERLOCK HOLMES*

CHAPTER THREE

Sherlock Holmes: APPLIED SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGIST*
by Marcello Truzzi

CHAPTER FOUR

Clues: Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes
by Carlo Ginzburg

IN THE FOLLOWING pages I will try to show how, in the late nineteenth century, an epistemological model (or, if you like, a paradigm2) quietly emerged in the sphere of the social sciences

perhaps help us to go beyond the sterile contrasting of "rationalism" and "irrationalism."

1. Between 1874 and 1876 a series of articles on Italian painting was published in the German art history journal

proposed a new method for the correct attribution of old masters, which provoked much discussion and controversy among art historians. Several years later the author revealed himself as Giovanni Morelli

The "Morelli method" is still referred to by art historians

one should refrain from the usual concentration on the most obvious characteristics of the paintings, for these could most easily be imitated

Instead one should concentrate on minor details, especially those least significant in the style typical of the painter's own school: earlobes, fingernails

Despite these achievements - and perhaps because of his almost arrogant assurance when presenting them - Morelli's method was much criticized. It was called mechanical, or crudely positivistic, and fell into disfavor

The implications of his method lay elsewhere, and were much richer, though Wind did, as we shall see, come close to perceiving them

2. Morelli's books look different from those of any other writer on art. They are sprinkled with illustrations of fingers and ears, careful records of the characteristic trifles by which an artist gives himself away

any art gallery studied by Morelli begins to resemble a rogues' gallery

This comparison was brilliantly developed by an Italian art historian, Enrico Castelnuovo (1968:782), who drew a parallel between Morelli's methods of classification and those attributed by Arthur Conan Doyle only a few years later to his fictional creation, Sherlock Holmes

let us look at "The Cardboard Box" (1892) for an illustration of Castelnuovo's point: here Holmes is as it were "morellizing."

The case starts with the arrival of two severed ears in a parcel sent to an innocent old lady. Here is the expert at work:
[Holmes] was staring with singular intentness at the lady's profile.
As a medical man, you are aware, Watson, that there is no part of the human body which varies so much as the human ear. Each ear is as a rule quite distinctive, and differs from all other ones. In last year's Anthropological Journal you will find two short monographs from my pen upon the subject. I had, therefore, examined the ears in the box with the eyes of an expert, and had carefully noted their anatomical peculiarities. Imagine my surprise then, when, on looking at Miss Cushing, I perceived that her ear corresponded exactly with the female ear which I had just inspected

It was evident that the victim was a blood relation, and probably a very close one.

To some of Morelli's critics it has seemed odd "that personality should be found where personal effort is weakest." But on this point modern psychology would certainly support Morelli: our inadvertent little gestures reveal our character far more authentically than any formal posture that we may carefully prepare

Wind's comments on Morelli have indeed drawn the attention of scholars (Hauser, 1959; see also Spector 1969, Damisch 1970 and 1977, and Wollheim 1973) to a neglected passage in Sigmund Freud's famous essay, "The Moses of Michelangelo" (1914). At the beginning of the second section Freud writes:
Long before I had any opportunity of hearing about psychoanalysis, I learned that a Russian art-connoisseur, Ivan Lermolieff, had caused a revolution in the art galleries of Europe by questioning the authorship of many pictures.
It seems to me that his method of inquiry is closely related to the technique of psychoanalysis. It, too, is accustomed to divine secret and concealed things from despised or unnoticed features, from the rubbish-heap, as it were, of our observations

The Moses of Michelangelo" was first published anonymously: Freud acknowledged it only when he included it in his collected works

there is no doubt that under the cloak of anonymity Freud declared, explicitly but also in a sense covertly, the considerable influence that Morelli had exercised on him long before his discovery of psychoanalysis

To confine this influence to "The Moses of Michelangelo" essay alone, as some have done, or even just to the essays connected with art history10 improperly reduces the significance of Freud's own comment

Here we have an element which contributed directly to the crystallization of psychoanalysis

Before we try to understand what Freud took from his readings of Morelli, we should clarify the precise timing of the encounteror rather, from Freud's account, of the two encounters

The first of these can only be dated very roughly. It must have been before 1895 (when Freud and Breuer published their Studies on Hysteria); or 1896 (when Freud first used the term psychoanalysis; see Robert 1966); and after 1883, when Freud, in December, wrote his fiancee a long letter about his "discovery of art" during a visit to the Dresden Gallery

Freud's second encounter with Morelli's writings can be dated with more confidence, though still presumptively

Ivan Lermolieff's real name was made public for the first time on the title page of the English translation of the collection, which came out in 1883

A copy of one of these volumes could possibly have been seen by Freud earlier or later, but it was most likely in September 1898, browsing in a Milan bookshop, that he came upon Lermolieff's real identity

In Freud's library, which is preserved in London, there is a copy of Giovanni Morelli: Critical historical studies in Italian painting: The Borghese and Doria Pamphili Galleries in Rome), published in Milan in 1897. A note in the front records its acquisition: Milan 14 September (Trosman and Simmons 1973). Freud's only visit to Milan was in the autumn of 1898 (Jones 1953).

But what significance did Morelli's essays have for Freud, still a young man, still far from psychoanalysis? Freud himself tells us: the proposal of an interpretative method based on taking marginal and irrelevant details as revealing clues

The irony in this passage from Morelli must have delighted Freud:

My adversaries are pleased to call me someone who has no understanding of the spiritual content of a work of art, and who therefore gives particular importance to external details such as the form of the hands, the ear, and even, horribile dictu [how shocking], to such rude things as fingernails

Furthermore, these marginal details were revealing, in Morelli's view, because in them the artist's subordination to cultural traditions gave way to a purely individual streak, details being repeated in a certain way "by force of habit, almost unconsciously"

The peculiar similarities between the activities of Holmes and Freud have been discussed by Steven Marcus (1976:x-xi).15 Freud himself, by the way, told a patient (the "Wolf-Man") how interested he was in Sherlock Holmes's stories. When, however, in the spring of 1913, a colleague of his (Theodor Reik) suggested a parallel between the psychoanalytic method and Holmes's method, Freud replied expressing his admiration of Morelli's technique as a connoisseur. In all three cases tiny details provide the key to a deeper reality, inaccessible by other methods.

How do we explain the triple analogy? There is an obvious answer. Freud was a doctor; Morelli had a degree in medicine; Conan Doyle had been a doctor before settling down to write

In all three cases we can invoke the model of medical semiotics or symptomatology - the discipline which permits diagnosis, though the disease cannot be directly observed, on the basis of superficial symptoms or signs, often irrelevant to the eye of the layman

Incidentally, the Holmes-Watson pair, the sharp-eyed detective and the obtuse doctor, represents the splitting of a single character, one of the youthful Conan Doyle's professors (Dr Joseph Bell), famous for his diagnostic ability.)

But it is not simply a matter of biographical coincidences

For thousands of years mankind lived by hunting. In the course of endless pursuits, hunters learned to reconstruct the appearance and movements of an unseen quarry through its tracksprints in soft ground, snapped twigs, droppings, snagged hairs or feathers, smells, puddles, threads of saliva.

They learned to make complex calculations in an instant, in shadowy wood or treacherous clearing

We have no verbal evidence to set beside their rock paintings and artifacts, but we can turn perhaps to the folktale, which sometimes carries an echofaint and distortedof what those far-off hunters knew. Three brothers (runs a story from the Middle East told among Kirghiz, Tatars, Jews, Turks, and so on; Vesselofsky 1886:308-309) meet a man who has lost a camel (or sometimes it is a horse). At once they describe it to him: it's white, and blind in one eye;
They must have seen it? No, they haven't seen it. So they're accused of theft and brought to be judged. The triumph of the brothers follows: they immediately show how from the barest traces they were able to reconstruct the appearance of an animal they had never set eyes on.

Perhaps indeed the idea of a narrative, as opposed to spell or exorcism or invocation (Seppilli 1962), originated in a hunting society, from the experience of interpreting tracks.

The hunter could have been the first "to tell a story" because only hunters knew how to read a coherent sequence of events from the silent (even imperceptible) signs left by their prey

CHAPTER EIGHT

Sherlock Holmes Formalized
by Jaakko Hintikka

CHAPTER NINE

The Body of the Detective Model: CHARLES S. PEIRCE AND EDGAR ALLAN POE
by Nancy Harrowitz

CHAPTER TEN

Horns, Hooves, Insteps: SOME HYPOTHESES ON THREE TYPES OF ABDUCTION
by Umberto Eco