Discriminating between observation and inference, between
From What the Best College Teachers Do
established fact and subsequent conjecture.
As I work through this checklist of critical thinking skills from Ken Bain’s book, I’m struck by how literature courses, through their focus on interpretation, can get at the thorny distinction between observation and inference.
For my quizzes this semester, I’ve been giving metaphors to identify and unpack. Yesterday, my metaphor came from the Sherlock Holmes short story: “A Scandal in Bohemia.”
“He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen…”
This is Watson describing his detective friend. Students wanted to make “machine” into “computer” or some kind of processing device, an interpretation of the metaphor that would clash with its 1891 publication date.
So we have two facts: the story came out in 1891 and Watson has called Holmes a machine.
The next part is inference: what does the word “machine” refer to?
The answer is any simple apparatus designed to perform a particular function. Holmes was made to reason.
The additional implication, however, that Holmes is not human. Watson reinforces this when he tells us that he didn’t want to love anyone because that would be like grit in his finely honed instrument. The story ends up showing the limits of Holmes’s gifts, however (and the way that his feeling of mental superiority is its own kind of distorting emotion).
If students walk out of the class with a better sense of how to identify things that are facts–the publication date and the meaning of a word at that time–they can start working on something more difficult, like the meaning of the metaphor Watson uses.