Critical Thinking Applied: Part 3

Discriminating between observation and inference, between
established fact and subsequent conjecture.

From What the Best College Teachers Do

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?

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