The Adventure of the Abductive Method

The Abductive Method | HiLobrow:

I’ve enjoyed watching the first three episodes of BBC’s Sherlock (aired this fall in the US; starring Benedict Cumberbatch and the brilliant Martin Freeman as Dr. Watson), particularly because doing so prompted me to revisit the notes I took, then put aside, when reading The Sign of Three (1983), a collection of essays about Arthur Conan Doyle’s character and the semiotician C.S. Peirce — or more precisely, Peirce’s theory of a little-understood mode of reasoning he named “abduction.”