The Philosophy of Sherlock Holmes

The Dog That Did Not Bark

153 The Dog That Did Not Bark Learning How to Read “The Book of Life” Carrie-Ann Biondi It is fair to say that there exists in our era a tragic discrepancy between the staggering richness of the visible world and the extreme poverty of our capacity to perceive it. —Robert Pogue Harrison Donning the Deerstalker Hat A good detective asks himself the question, “Am I missing something?” One can miss something in at least three ways. The first and most obvious way is to overlook something that is in front of you, such as a book you are searching for when you misremember its being red rather than blue. A second and fairly common way is not to recognize the significance of what you do notice, discounting its relevance for the task at hand. For example, a police cadet might be baffled that all of the doors and windows of a robbed bank are locked, not realizing that this indicates an inside job. The third and least obvious way is to fail to note the significant absence of something. This last omission can take any number of forms: not realizing that something that once was there is now gone, not recognizing that what doesn’t happen can provide important clues to what has, not seeing another option that would reveal the false alternatives in someone’s argument. The failure to notice something’s absence is easy to do; it takes a distinct set of skills, knowledge, and virtues to develop the ability to glean information from absence or silence.1 The disparity to which Harrison refers in the epigraph above—between the richness of the world and the poverty of perception—has been a peren- 154 Carrie-Ann Biondi nial affliction. Sherlock Holmes notes the rarity of keen perceptual and mental faculties: “There are fifty who can reason synthetically for one who can reason analytically. . . . There are few people . . . who, if you told them a result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were that led up to that result.”2 Holmes is a fictional master of perceiving the “sounds of silence.” A famous example of this comes from the Conan Doyle story “The Adventure of Silver Blaze,” in which Holmes infers from the fact of a dog’s not barking crucial details that put him on track to solve the case. Called in to solve the apparent murder of a horse trainer, John Straker, and the disappearance of the prizewinning horse, Silver Blaze, Holmes collects evidence from the King’s Pyland stable and the surrounding Dartmoor countryside. The terrain has already been examined by the police, who arrested the bookmaker Fitzroy Simpson, who had been lurking about the stable the night of the tragedy. Holmes, though, is able to perceive more than surface appearances. Is Simpson really the culprit? Many people had an incentive to keep Silver Blaze out of the upcoming race, but adding murder to theft seems unnecessary. Then there is the matter of the stable boy’s being drugged with opium in his curried mutton dinner, allowing someone to enter the unguarded stable as the other stable boys slept soundly in the loft above. Holmes could see how the circumstantial evidence against Simpson could easily mislead. After Sherlock offers an important lead to the police, Inspector Gregory (who fails to appreciate that lead) asks Holmes whether anything else is important: “Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” “That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.3 In this story, Holmes, rather than Gregory, is the person who solves the mystery of the missing racehorse because, as Holmes notes, he possesses and understands “the value of imagination” that Gregory lacks.4 Holmes soon explains his reasoning from silence: “I had grasped the significance of the silence of the dog, for one true inference invariably suggests others. The Simpson incident had shown me that a dog was kept in the stables, and yet, though someone had been in and had fetched out a horse, he had not barked The Dog That Did Not Bark 155 enough to arouse the two lads in the loft. Obviously the midnight visitor was someone whom the dog knew well.”5 Gregory needed to be a much better student...