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Topic: Arthur Conan Doyle

Today we remember Arthur Conan Doyle, the British writer and spiritualist who was born in Scotland on this date in 1859. Trained as a physician and knighted for his wartime efforts during the Boer War, Conan Doyle is best remembered for his fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes was open about his methods of deduction. In A Study in Scarlet, he allowed as to what a "grand thing [it] is to be able to reason backwards . . . people do not practise it much. In the everyday affairs of life it is more useful to reason forward, and so the other comes to be neglected." He concluded, "There are fifty who can reason synthetically for one who can reason analytically."

In case you need to take this approach from a different angle, we offer this Holmesian analysis. "We approached the case," recalled the great detective ". . . with an absolutely blank mind, which is always an advantage. We had formed no theories. We were simply there to observe and to draw inferences from our observations."

So how does one distinguish between inferring and deducing? Infer indicates arriving at an opinion or coming to accept a probability on the basis of available evidence, which may be slight. Deduce adds to infer implications of ordered logical thought used in the study of logic to draw a specific inference from a general principle. In popular use, as Sherlock Holmes used it, deduce is used to infer a truth from analysis of evidence.

Questions or comments? Write us at wftw@aol.com Production and research support for Word for the Wise comes from Merriam-Webster, publisher of language reference books and Web sites including Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition.

i love the creepy way he uses animals

hounds
apes
speckled snakes