Recently I mentioned the celebratedly spurious Holmesian nonquotation, “Elementary, my dear Watson.” I pointed out that TheYale Book of Quotations proposes as the earliest known source The New York Times
We’re sorry, something went wrong.
We are unable to fully display the content of this page.
This is most likely due to a content blocker on your computer or network.
Please allow access to our site and then refresh this page.
You may then be asked to log in, create an account (if you don't already have one),
or subscribe.
If you continue to experience issues, please contact us at 202-466-1032 or help@chronicle.com.
Recently I mentioned the celebratedly spurious Holmesian nonquotation, “Elementary, my dear Watson.” I pointed out that TheYale Book of Quotations proposes as the earliest known source The New York Times issue of Tuesday, April 30, 1911.
But after my post appeared I got an email from Oliver Kamm, a columnist and editorial writer working for The Times of London. He says he remembers seeing the phrase in an earlier source: P.G. Wodehouse’s novel Psmith, Journalist.
In a few seconds, thanks to Project Gutenberg, I had an electronic transcript of the text of that novel before me. All I had to do to verify Kamm’s claim was search for the relatively infrequent word elementary. And there it was:
“I fancy,” said Psmith, “that this is one of those moments when it is necessary for me to unlimber my Sherlock Holmes system. As thus. If the rent collector had been here, it is certain, I think, that Comrade Spaghetti, or whatever you said his name was, wouldn’t have been. That is to say, if the rent collector had called and found no money waiting for him, surely Comrade Spaghetti would have been out in the cold night instead of under his own roof-tree. Do you follow me, Comrade Maloney?”
“That’s right,” said Billy Windsor. “Of course.”
“Elementary, my dear Watson, elementary,” murmured Psmith.
[Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, Psmith, Journalist, Chapter 19; published in book form by Adam & Charles Black, London, 1915, but previously serialized in The Captain between October 1909 and February 1910.]
ADVERTISEMENT
This sort of decisive antedating should remind us of the almost diametrical wrongness of a popular stereotype of scientists and humanists.
Scientists, some people seem to think, systematically amass stockpiles of hard facts, while humanities scholars grapple with much more subjective and less truth-apt domains like value, judgment, insight, and sentiment. Science deals in objective truth while the humanities do not.
Such stereotypes seem to lurk behind many thoughtless statements made not only by humanities types but also by philosophically unsophisticated scientists. The reality seems to me very different in many respects. Science proceeds by a process of what Karl Popper called conjecture and refutation, and might just as well have called speculation and disappointment.
Empirical hypotheses are entertained, but can never be proved (by an argument due to Hume, no finite amount of evidence entails the truth of any specific nontrivial hypothesis to the exclusion of all rivals). Experiments may yield disappointment, in the form of evidence that specific clusters of assumptions are apparently wrong, but that doesn’t tell us how to find a set of beliefs that are true. Especially in view of the rather terrifying evidence that nearly all published scientific findings are probably false.
The truth is a massive disjunction of all the sets of assumptions that haven’t been refuted yet, and scientists drift around between the disjuncts in a haze of uncertainty and impuzzlement.
ADVERTISEMENT
Yet at least some humanities fields know the quiet satisfaction of finding truth. Antedating is just one example. Oliver Kamm has shown us that The New York Times was not responsible for making up the phantom line in 1911; Wodehouse put it in the mouth of a fictional character about two years earlier. That isn’t a hypothesis; it’s a fact. You can go to the library and check it by looking at any arbitrary copy of Psmith, Journalist.
Don’t overinterpret my point. I’m not suggesting that literature, philology, and history lack unsolved puzzles. There are indefinitely many; I discussed a typical authorship conundrum here.
And I’m not interested in an arm-wrestling match with global skepticism. I accept that it is logically possible that all the world’s copies of Psmith are forgeries created in the 1920s by a vast conspiracy aimed at saving The New York Times from a charge of misquotation and blaming Wodehouse for it. But that’s a loony skeptical stance, not a live contender in practical terms. From a common-sense perspective it’s an ordinary verifiable fact that Wodehouse wrote the line. There’s no ordinary verifiable fact about what causes the volcanic activity and surface reformation on Pluto; there, speculation and controversy reign.
My point is not about logical possibilities or skeptical doubts or trust in science (naturally, scientists sometimes encounter solid common-sense truths like anyone else). It is merely that scientists often deal in speculation and conjecture and subtle judgment calls between conflicting insights, while at least sometimes humanities scholars trade in plain, practically confirmable facts. The so-called two cultures do not differ quite as much as the sillier stereotypes might suggest.