cover next page > title: The Sign of Three : Dupin, Holmes, Peirce Advances in Semiotics author: Eco, Umberto. publisher: Indiana University Press isbn10 | asin: 0253204879 print isbn13: 9780253204875 ebook isbn13: 9780585020723 language: English subject Doyle, Arthur Conan,--Sir,--1859-1930--Characters--Sherlock Holmes, Poe, Edgar Allan,--1809-1849--Characters--Auguste Dupin, Peirce, Charles S.--(Charles Sanders),--1839-1914, Detective and mystery stories--History and criticism, Criminal investigation in publication date: 1983 lcc: PR4624.S53 1983eb ddc: 823/.8 subject: Doyle, Arthur Conan,--Sir,--1859-1930--Characters--Sherlock Holmes, Poe, Edgar Allan,--1809-1849--Characters--Auguste Dupin, Peirce, Charles S.--(Charles Sanders),--1839-1914, Detective and mystery stories--History and criticism, Criminal investigation in cover next page > If you like this book, buy it! < previous page cover-0 next page > THE SIGN OF THREE < previous page cover-0 next page > If you like this book, buy it! < previous page cover-1 next page > Advances in Semiotics THOMAS A. SEBEOK, GENERAL EDITOR < previous page cover-1 next page > If you like this book, buy it! < previous page cover-2 next page > THE SIGN OF THREE Dupin, Holmes, Peirce EDITED BY Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington and Indianapolis < previous page cover-2 next page > If you like this book, buy it! < previous page cover-3 next page > First Midland Book Edition 1988 Copyright 1983 by Indiana University Press All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title: The Sign of three. (Advances in semiotics) Bibliography: p. 221 1. Doyle, Arthur Conan, Sir, 1859-1930Characters Sherlock Holmes. 2. Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849 CharactersAuguste Dupin. 3. Peirce, Charles S. (Charles Sanders), 1839-1914. 4. Detective and mystery storiesHistory and criticism. 5. Criminal investiga- tion in literature. 6. Logic in literature. 7. Semiotics. I. Eco, Umberto. II. Sebeok, Thomas Albert, 1920- III. Series. PR4624.S53 1984 823'.8 82-49207 ISBN 0-253-35235-5 (cl.) ISBN 0-253-20487-9 (pa.) 4 5 6 7 99 98 97 96 < previous page cover-3 next page > If you like this book, buy it! < previous page page_v next page > Page v CONTENTS Preface UMBERTO ECO AND THOMAS A. SEBEOK vii Abbreviations in the Text THOMAS A. SEBEOK xi 1 One, Two, Three Spells U B E R T Y THOMAS A. SEBEOK 1 2 "You Know My Method": A Juxtaposition of Charles S. Peirce and Sherlock Holmes THOMAS A. SEBEOK AND JEAN UMIKER-SEBEOK 11 3 Sherlock Holmes: Applied Social Psychologist MARCELLO TRUZZI 55 4 Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method CARLO GINZBURG 81 5 To Guess or Not To Guess? MASSIMO A. BONFANTINI AND GIAMPAOLO PRONI 119 6 Peirce, Holmes, Popper GIAN PAOLO CARETTINI 135 7 Sherlock Holmes Confronts Modern Logic: Toward a Theory of Information-Seeking through Questioning JAAKKO HINTIKKA AND MERRILL B. HINTIKKA 154 8 Sherlock Holmes Formalized JAAKKO HINTIKKA 170 Page vi < previous page page_v next page > If you like this book, buy it! < previous page cover-0 next page > THE SIGN OF THREE < previous page cover-0 next page > If you like this book, buy it! < previous page page_vii next page > 9 The Body of the Detective Model: Charles S. Peirce and Edgar Allan Poe NANCY HARROWITZ 179 10 Horns, Hooves, Insteps: Some Hypotheses on Three Types of Abduction UMBERTO ECO 198 References 221 Page vii PREFACE The editors agree that this book has not been "programmed," which is to say, it did not result from rule and case, from, in a word, deduction. Peirce taught that it is not absolutely true that every event is "determined by causes according to law,' as, for example, "if a man and his antipode sneeze at the same instant, [t]hat is merely what we call coincidence" (1.406). 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. (2) Sebeok then remarked that he knew of an essay, on much the same topic, published some years earlier by Marcello Truzzi, a sociologist and evident Holmes buff, not especially known to be "into" semiotics. Truzzi, citing mainly Popper, not Peirce, was undoubtedly concerned with the problem of abduction or, in any case, with hypothetical-deductive methods. (3) A few weeks later, Sebeok found out that the eminent Finnish logician, Jaakko Hintikka, had written two (at the time) unpublished papers on Sherlock Holmes and modern logic. Hintikka made no explicit reference to Peirce's abduction, but the problem was the same. (4) During the same period, Eco read a paper, published in 1979, which one of his colleagues at the University of Bologna had been announcing for a year or more. This paper recounted the employment of conjectural models from Hippocrates and Thucydides, to their use by art experts in the nineteenth century. The author, historian Carlo Ginzburg, quoted, however, in his revealing footnotes, Zadig, Peirce, and even Sebeok. It goes without saying that Sherlock Holmes was a chief protagonist in this erudite study, side by side with Freud and Morelli. (5) Next, Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok published an early version of their studyafter the former delivered it, in October 1978, as a lecture at Brown University, within the framework of a meeting devoted to "Methodology in Semiotics"juxtaposing Peirce and Holmes; and Eco published his lecture on Zadig. The latter then organized, in 1979, a six-month seminar at the University of Bologna on Peirce and detective novels. At almost the same time, Sebeokcompletely unaware of Eco's parallel teaching activityoffered a course, entitled "Semiotic Approaches to James Bond and Sherlock Holmes," < previous page page_vii next page > If you like this book, buy it! < previous page page_viii next page > Page viii for Indiana University's Comparative Literature Program; (he did, however, utilize Eco's 1965 study of narrative structures in Ian Fleming). Among the more palpable consequences of Eco's seminar was the paper by two of his collaborators, Bonfantini and Proni, now included in this book; and one of the results of Sebeok's course was his analysis, jointly with one of his students in the course, Harriet Margolis, on the semiotics of windows in Sherlock Holmes (first published in a 1982 issue of Poetics Today). While all this was going on, Eco was pursuing researches into the history of semiotics, and ran across the Aristotelian theory of definition; his paper in this book is one outcome of these lines of investigation. (6) In the meantime, Sebeok and Eco decided to put together these papers, and the Indiana University Press agreed, with much enthusiasm, to join them in this venture. During one of his fall courses at Yale University, Eco gave the collected manuscript materials to Nancy Harrowitz, who wrote a term paper for him on Peirce and Poe, for which Holmes's method, following a suggestion made in the paper of the Sebeoks, became an obviously compulsory term of reference. (7) A further surprising fact came to light when Eco discovered that Gian Paolo Caprettini, at the University of Turin, had been conducting, for two years, a seminar on Peirce and Holmes. Caprettini is a well-known student of Peirce, but this was the first time that Eco and Caprettini spoke together about Holmes. This coincidence was at least worth following up, as a sequel of which Caprettini, too, was invited to collaborate in this book. We are under the impression that, if we continued to fumble around, we might well have found other similar contributions. (Perhaps the spirit of history expressed in the Zeitgeist of our age is not a mere Hegelian specter!) But we had to abandon our quest, if for no other reason, for lack of time. 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 (cf. our consolidated References in this book, and more generally, Ronald Burt De Waal's incomparable World Bibliography of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, 1974-). The secondary literature concerning Sherlock Holmes adds up to a truly awesome array of items, but we wished to concentrate on those relatively few and recent items that are pertinent to the history of abductive methodology. 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. Saul Kripke, for example, wrote to Sebeok, on December 29, 1980, a letter which said, in part: "Actually I have one or two unpublished talks and a whole unpublished lecture series (my John Locke lectures at Oxford) on fictional discourse in empty names, in which Holmes might appear even more prominently" than in his earlier use of him in his "Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic,' or the Addenda to his "Naming and Necessity." Many works are still tied to the idea that Holmes's method hovered somewhere midway between deduction and induction.