The house depicted is the Old Mill House in Grantchester which was occupied by Alfred North Whitehead when he was a professor at Cambridge University (Grantchester being sort of a suburb of Cambridge). Whitehead was a mathematican-philosopher who was a contemporary of Arthur Conan Doyle (Whitehead was about two years younger). As someone who would call himself both a Sherlockian and a Whiteheadian, the use of this picture represents my feeble attempt to bring the two interests together. (When one contemplates that Whitehead's Principle of Relativity was published in the same year as The Problem of Thor Bridge, the magnitude of this task rather comes home.)

This has not daunted other Sherlockians, however -- The Sign of Three (Indiana University Press) unites Holmes, Edgar Allen Poe and Charles Sanders Peirce ) -- but Whitehead?

It is perhaps a human trait that we wish to unite our loves, and perhaps a commentary on our inabilities that we so often fail in the effort. (I have never been able to explain the connection between clipper ships and Valesques even to myself.) (For those who wish an answer, books about both were found in the public library where I grew up.)

But ... to answer the posed (and the implied) question ...

This could not be Lafter Hall for the very simple reason that there is no flat roof for Mr Frankland to stand his telescope upon. Also, this is what the English would have called a 'cottage' ... it being in no way grand enough to be awared the title of 'Hall'. So -- to answer the second question -- I used it simply because it evoked my other love, which was Whitehead. Which, as they would say in logic class, devolves the question onto its premise -- which is why did I make a connection between Holmes and Whitehead in the first place?

My re-acquaintance with Holmes is fairly recent (if you are sixtyish, five years ago is 'fairly recent') and I was struck by the occasional claims that Holmes 'deduced' things when no such operation of logic could have been involved. I remembered, however, one of the few things that I had understood in the writings of C.S. Peirce which was his division of 'logic' into three types -- Deduction, Induction, and (his own coinage) Abduction.

Abduction (in CSP's terminology) is the reasoning from effect to cause, and this was -- or so it seemed to me -- exactly what Holmes so often did (usually in the beginings of Watson's reports, when he would deduce from mud-splatters on Watson's person that Watson had sent a telegram). From abduction to Peirce to Whitehead was a fairly short step (at least for me), for Peirce and Whitehead have long been linked in the philosophical literature as contemporaries who were interested in the broad questions about reasoning. (And Holmes himself is, we have been told, a 'reasoning machine'.)

[this is a work in progress -- come back for updates]

Copyright ©2001 David Richardson