Inferences to the Best Explanation

Prof. Baigre
Caroline (Ruo yi) Lin
Student #1001333112
25-Sep-2014
This may be an overdone example, but when Professor Baigre explained the idea of an
inference to the best explanation, or closed inductive reasoning, I jumped immediately to Sherlock
Holmes. In a very precise manner, Holmes collects his evidence, analyses it, and proposes the
simplest explanation which fits; the explanations are indeed so simple that all other explanations
seem absurd.
There is one case, entitled The Man with the Twisted Lip, with an especially peculiar array
of facts: a woman reports the disappearance of her wealthy husband, Mr. St Clair, whom she sees
last in the window of a second-floor opium den. She comes into the den to find some bricks her
husband bought as a present for their children, but cannot find him. Instead, there is a beggar in the
room she first sees him in, and blood on the beggars hands, which Holmes construes as evidence of
a struggle. St Clairs coat is also found sunk in the lake which the windows of the opium den faces,
though his body is not recovered.
Holmes initial conclusion is that St Clair was murdered by the beggar, and this is an example
of an inference to the best explanation. Holmes sees a disappeared man, with his coat thrown in the
ocean, and a beggar with bloody hands. He infers that the coat, and perhaps the body, were thrown
into the water causing death, and that they were thrown by the beggar, who has plenty of reason to
rob and kill St Clair and was nearest to him at the time. Holmes is using a sort of reverse-deduction,
since hidden within his logic are silent syllogisms: that some people in want of money will be
desperate enough to kill for it; that a person who committed a murder would want to dispose of the
evidence, that the beggar must have been responsible for St Clairs disappearance since humans can

only move so quickly. Its as if the evidence he is given form the conclusions to so many broken
syllogisms, and Holmes job is to assemble a collection of syllogisms, some of which by necessity
contain only likely premises and not absolute; and must then make these point overwhelmingly to a
single, final conclusion: in this case, that the beggar murdered St Clair. Holmes takes the evidence
presented to him and infers from it the most likely cause of them all, and that is inference to the best
explanation.
A property of inference to the best explanation is that it must account for all of the facts if it
is to be taken seriously, and an inference which meets a fact outside of its powers of explanation
must be re-examined and reworked. In the multivariate fields of science, this is common practice,
and as it is with Holmes. It turns out that in our story, Mrs. St Clair receives a letter from her
husband mailed after his presumed murder, stating that he cannot visit her, but is assuredly alive.
Holmes must then question his assumptions. How could a murdered man send letters? Holmes
could infer that the beggar was sending fraudulent letters in order to appear innocent, but Mrs. St
Clair is certain that the letter is genuine. Holmes thus concludes that St Clair could not have been
murdered. He re-evaluates his syllogisms, finally choosing a set which is extraordinary, yet still
likeliest of all possible sets: that St Clair had not been murdered by the beggar, but instead, is the
beggar. Indeed, this turns out to be the case. Holmes wipes clean the face of the beggar, now in jail,
and finds him to be St Clair, who confesses that he had been working as a professional beggar for
many years and had hidden the fact from his wife out of shame.
Inference to the best explanation is by no means certain, for it deals with premises of varying
probability, and yet it is as closed as deduction for the very fact that it deals with them at all.