The Search for Truth—A Policeman's Reflections

Abstract

To the minds of most people, well supported by the Oxford Dictionary, is systematic and formulated knowledge-depending on deductions from self-evident truths. This definition brought to my mind Talented Man by Winthrop Mackworth PraedOf science and logic he chatters As fine and as fast as he can Though I am no judge of such matters I'm sure he's a talented man. The very word Science brings forth an image of cold, objective, factual, logical and, perhaps most importantly, tested facts and conclusions. Conan Doyle, in Sign of Four has Sherlock Holmes saying to Watson, Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid. I must tell you, straightaway, that I do not subscribe to that view. The fact of the matter is that unless inconsistencies are taken into account, the dimensions of any problem are halved. For instance, I lost a great deal of faith in mathematics when I learnt that it can be proved that 1 = 1. I know that it doesn't but it can be proved that it does. Furthermore, I know that one can prove anything if one does not distinguish between truth and falsehood. I t was Oscar Wilde who said truth is rarely pure and never simple so how does one arrive at the truth? I suspect that the search for truth is about as fruitless as the search for the Holy Grail and that truth, like beauty, is found only in the eye of the beholder. The strange thing about the concept of truth is that it still exists. Platonists were fascinated by it; essayists, poets and philosophers through the ages have sought it and still the quest goes on. Now it is an integral part of our judicial -