my book is titled "Plato and a Platypus walk into a bar..." By Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein.
This book is about understanding basic philisophical principles through the medium of jokes and comedy.
An excerpt from this book on the subject of Inductive Logic (the type of logic sherlock holmes uses, not deduction) this logic is used when after observing something happen enough times, say an fruit falling from a tree you can form a hypothesis that fruits will always fall down. Then you can induct that all things fall down from the way that you saw the fruit falling from. This is a joke that uses this logic.
"Holmes and Watson are on a camping trip. in the middle of the night Holmes wakes up and gives Dr. Watson a nudge. "Watson," he says, "Look up at the sky and tell me what you see".
"I see millions of stars, Holmes" says watson.
"And what do you conclude from that, Watson?"
Watson thinks for a moment. "Well" he says, "Astronomically, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets. Astrologically, I observe that saturn is in leo. Horologically, I DEDUCE that the time is approximately a quarter past three. Meteorogically, I suspect that we will have a beutiful day tomorrow. Theologically I see that God is all-powerful, and we are small and insignificant. Uh, what do you see Holmes?"
"Watson, you idiot! Someone has stolen our tent!"
Holmes came to this conclusion because they fell asleep under a tent and knowing that tents dont walk away on their own he induced that the tent was taken for that is the most likely course of events. Watson howeve misunderstands Holmes' question and believes that Holmes is testing his intellegence in different fields and fails to notice that when he fell asleep he was under a tent and when he awoke he was looking at the sky. Inductinve logic is part of human nature so that we can identify patterns which give us more general knowledge of the world around us.
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