Abstract
Born on January 6th, 1854, Sherlock Holmes died on March 5th, 1927. He was a consulting detective from 1881 and 1904, when at age 50 he retired to a small farm in the South Sussex Downs. A Study in Scarlet, the first of the Holmes stories, appeared in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887. The last one, “The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place”, finished things off in The Strand Magazine of 1927.
Well, then, about that chasm. I had no serious difficulty in getting out of it, for the very simple reason that I wasn’t in it …. No, Watson, I was never in it.
Holmes to Watson, in The Adventure of the Empty House (1894)
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Notes
- 1.
There are 60 stories in all, each appearing in popular magazines, four of which were reissued as novels, A Study in Scarlet being one of them. The Hound of the Baskervilles is another.
- 2.
The reason for Holmes’ deception was to evade the vengeance of Moriarty’s senior lieutenants by going into deep incommunicado hiding. “The Final Problem” appeared in 1893. Its sequel, however, was not “The Adventure of the Empty House”, but rather The Hound of the Baskervilles. Set before “The Final Problem”, it was the first Holmes story to appear after 1893, serialized in The Strand Magazine between August 1901 and April 1902. “The Adventure of the Empty House” appeared the year after, and is the first of the 13 stories in The Return of Sherlock Holmes series.
- 3.
Two of the stories are anonymously narrated, and two are narrated by Holmes. One of them was set 3 years after Holmes’ retirement. (“The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane”, 1907)
- 4.
It is not unusual for authors to make mistakes, but Doyle made no mistake here, even if Watson was after the fact made to have done. Nicholas Griffin writes, “Dr. Watson, as is well known, has an old war wound. I am reliably informed that in some stories it is located in his leg and others in his arm”. (“Foreword” to The Logic of Fiction, 2009; p. 9). Gregory Currie reports it as a leg and/or shoulder wound. (The Nature of Fiction, 1990; 69) The inconsistency, in either case, was inadvertent. The question is how, upon its discovery, Doyle’s readers handle it. As far as I can tell, they don’t pay it much mind. Watson’s wound is in one place or the other and remains, and as is most of what is true of Holmes’ faithful friend, unknown to readers.
- 5.
In canon law, a marriage is annulled upon ex post facto discovery that one or more elements required for a God-making union was missing at the time of pronouncement, which accordingly had no performative effect. No backward causation here. Annulments in civil law have a like explanation except that, there one or more elements required for contractual union was missing at the moment of pronouncement. When a high court strikes down an existing law, there are two schools of thought. People of judicial activist leanings will see the old law as having been valid in its day and as having now passed its expiry-date. Others of more traditionalist inclination see the later decision as having revealed that the old law never was law in the first place. Either way, backwards causation isn’t the issue.
- 6.
See David Lewis, “Truth in fiction”, and Robin Le Poidevin, “Worlds within worlds? The paradoxes of embedded fiction”, British Journal of Aesthetics, 35 (1995), 227–38; 230–231.
- 7.
An important but less dominant rival is Discourse Representation Theory. See, for example, Hans Kamp and Uwe Reyle, From Discourse to Logic: Introduction to Model Theoretic Semantics of Natural Language, Formal Logic and Discourse Representation Theory, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993.
- 8.
Ori Simchen, “Metasemantics and legal interpretation”, in George Pavlakos and Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco, editors, Reasons and Intentions in Law and Practical Agency, pages 72–92, Cambridge: University Press, 2015. See also his Semantics, Metasemantics, Aboutness, New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
- 9.
Peter van Inwagen, “Meta-Ontology”, Erkenntnis, 48 (1998), 233–250; reprinted in van Inwagen, Material Beings, pages 13–31, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.
- 10.
Lewis Carroll, Mind, 4 (1895), 278–280. Relief is offered in my “Required by logic”, in Amirouche Moktefi and Francine F. Abeles, editors, What the Tortoise Said to Achilles: Lewis Carroll’s Paradox of Inference, a double issue of The Carrollian: The Lewis Carroll Journal, 28 (2016), 112–124. Even better is George Englebretsen’s “What did Lewis Carroll think the tortoise said to Achilles?, pages 76–83, The Carrollian 2016.
- 11.
What would have been true of Gladstone is that he had been fictionalized in that story of Doyle’s.
- 12.
Ignorant, at the time, of its adumbration in Mally’s distinction between nuclear and nonnuclear properties. See the Appendix on Mally in Dale Jacquette’s Alexius Meinong, the Shepherd of Non-Being, Heidelberg: Springer, 2015. See also my “Fictionality and the logic of relations”, 1969.
- 13.
New York: Crown, 1978.
- 14.
This requires qualification. There could be cases in which ownership of a fictional character passes by agreement to a different author, who is then free to make further things history-constitutive of that identically the same character.
- 15.
In Nonexistent Objects, Parsons draws the distinction by cases. A thing’s nuclear properties are ordinary ones, such as being round and being red. Its extranuclear ones are special properties such as being existent or possible or thought of by Meinong. Jacquette gives a formal definition in Meinongian Logic, at section 5.1. Kroon’s reservations are developed in “Taming the existent golden mountain”.
- 16.
Except equivocally at the end of “The Final Problem”, of course, when at that point, he no longer existed, until later on Doyle made it the case that he didn’t not exist then.
- 17.
“The question of ontology”, in David Chalmers, David Manley, and Ryan Wasserman, editors, Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology, pages 157–177, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009.
- 18.
Pp. 171–172.
- 19.
The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary has it that a legend is “a traditional story sometimes popularly regarded as historical but not authenticated.”
- 20.
“On Sinn und Bedeutung”, translated by Max Black, in Michael Beaney, editor, The Frege Reader, pages 151–171, Oxford: Blackwell, 1997; first published in German in 1892. For an astute investigation of what they take to be Frege’s three different theories of reference, see Francis Jeffry Pelletier and Bernard Linsky, “Russell vs. Frege on definite descriptions as singular terms”, in Nicholas Griffin and Dale Jacquette, editors, Russell vs. Meinong. The Legacy of “On Denoting”, pages 40–64, New York and London: Routledge, 2009.
- 21.
Tarski put himself in a similar bind, arguing that the paradox of truth made Polish an every other human tongue logically incoherent, while presenting that view and all his others in Polish or German or English.
- 22.
Concerning reference failure in science – e.g. “divergent infinite series” – Frege is disposed to assign to sentences embodying such expressions the arbitrarily selected value of zero. Russell was not amused. See Bertrand Russell, “On denoting”, in Alasdair Urquhart, editor, The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, volume 4, The Foundations of Logic, 1903–05, pages 415–427, London and New York: Routledge, 1994; first published, in 1905 in Mind.
- 23.
“On referring” in 1950 in Mind, 59, 320–344; reprinted with changes in Anthony Flew, editor, Essays in Conceptual Analysis, pages 21–52, London: Macmillan, 1966. The attribution “secondary” is made at p. 35 of the reprint.
- 24.
Griffin rightly points out that we know nothing of the servant, not even his name, “who enters in act V, scene II of Richard II and exits a minute later without saying a word.” This is not quite right as stated, but the point is clear. This is the sum total that any reader or theatre-goer will ever know of this fellow, whom the Duke of York ordered to saddle his horse. But there’s lots more that York knows about him, and his mother lots more than that. There is a great deal to be known about the servant, even though we ourselves will have almost none of it. The situation of the present king of France is nothing like this. There is nothing to be known of him because there is no him of whom it could be known. See here Nicholas Griffin, “Through the Woods to Meinong’s Jungle”, in Kent A. Peacock and Andrew D. Irvine, editors, Mistakes of Reason, pages 15–32, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005; p. 16.
- 25.
As is the case that “There is something that has the Sosein of being golden and a mountain but lacks every kind of Sein.”
- 26.
See, for example, W. V. Quine, “On what there is”, Review of Metaphysics 2 (1948), 21–38, reprinted in the Aristotelian Society Supplementary, 25 (1951); “Quantification and the empty domain”, Journal of Symbolic Logic, 19 (1954), 177–179, reprinted in Selected Logic Papers, enlarged edition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, and “Speaking of objects”, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 31 (1958), 5–22; reprinted in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, 1977.
- 27.
“Not so fast!”, some will say. John Burgess has shown how a language that is equivalent to Quinean English in canonical notation but which is incapable of quantification. There are no variables in this language. Quine himself showed that English canonical notation is equivalent to a variable-free language. What, then, is to be done about Quine’s motto, “To be is to be the value of a bound variable of quantification”? See John P. Burgess, “Being explained away”, The Harvard Review of Philosophy, 13 (2005), 41–56; reprinted in Burgess, Mathematics, Models, and Modality: Selected Philosophical Essays, pages 85–103, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008, and W. V. Quine, “Variables explained away”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 104 (1960), 343–347.
- 28.
More carefully, Zeus is a being of the mythological kind or, as Elizabeth Anscombe once said, of the false god kind, whereas there is nothing of any kind ensuing from the referential collapse of “The present king of France is bald.” There is no site at which its purported referent is anything at all.
- 29.
John Woods, “Essentialism, self-identity and quantifying in”, in Milton K. Munitz, editor, Identity and Individuation, pages 165–198, New York: New York University Press, 1971.
- 30.
W. V. Quine, “Review of Munitz, editor, Identity and Individuation”, Journal of Philosophy, 69 (1972), 488–497. Reprinted in part in Theories and Things, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
- 31.
Pursuit of Truth, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992; p. 35. But see, again, Berto’s Existence as a Real Property.
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Woods, J. (2018). Sherlock. In: Truth in Fiction. Synthese Library, vol 391. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72658-8_5
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