Abstract
This paper examines critically the reconstruction of the ‘Sherlock Holmes sense of deduction’ proposed jointly by M.B. Hintikka (1939–1987) and J. Hintikka (1929–2016) in the 1980s, and its successor, the interrogative model of inquiry (imi) developed by J. Hintikka and his collaborators in the 1990s. The Hintikkas’ model explicitly used game theory in order to formalize a naturalistic approach to inquiry, but the imi abandoned both the game-theoretic formalism, and the naturalistic approach. It is argued that the latter better supports the claim that the imi provides a ‘logic of discovery’, and safeguards its empirical adequacy. Technical changes necessary to this interpretation are presented, and examples are discussed, both formal and informal, that are better analyzed when these changes are in place. The informal examples are borrowed from Conan Doyle’s The Case of Silver Blaze, a favorite of M.B. and J. Hintikka.
Highlights
In the 1920s, Popper (1959) and Reichenbach (1938) converged to the view that hypothesis making involves a psychological element that eludes rational reconstruction, formal or informal
The Hintikkas proposed to capture inquiry as a two-player game between Nature and Inquirer, and emphasized the strategic role of logical reasoning, formally reconstructing the “Sherlock Holmes sense of deduction” (Hintikka and Hintikka 1983). They laid down logical foundations for their model and specified constraints on Inquirer’s strategies resulting from bounded cognitive resources
Hintikka’s demise, when Hintikka et al (1999) characterized interrogative reasoning with the resources of the meta-theory of standard first-order logic alone. Their results were straightforward consequences of elementary meta-theorems, but they argued that the results were conceptually fruitful, offering a strategic viewpoint on logical reasoning, and a basis for a logic of discovery
Summary
In the 1920s, Popper (1959) and Reichenbach (1938) converged to the view that hypothesis making involves a psychological element that eludes rational reconstruction, formal or informal. The Hintikkas proposed to capture inquiry as a two-player game between Nature and Inquirer, and emphasized the strategic role of logical reasoning, formally reconstructing the “Sherlock Holmes sense of deduction” (Hintikka and Hintikka 1983). They laid down logical foundations for their model and specified constraints on Inquirer’s strategies resulting from bounded cognitive resources (memory Hintikka and Hintikka 1983; attention Hintikka and Hintikka 1989). They reflect the reductio assumption that all formulas on the left-hand side of the tableau are true They push negation in, which prevents traffic between columns The construction of a Cut-free tableau is always possible in principle, but the Cut rule is critical for the reconstruction of Holmesian deduction, to which I will turn
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