Sherlock Holmes and abductive reasoning: A semiotic look at scientific discourse

Abstract

This essay presents a semiotic look at scientific discourse. For its interpretation, an analysis was made of the discursive enunciation of Sherlock Holmes' fictional series "The Sign of the Four", in which the semiotic actor represents a private detective, who adopts the abductive method to clarify the different cases. The film director encourages the viewer to enter a possible world with elements of drama and suspense, in order to keep his attention throughout the film. The investigation finds its support in the works of the philosopher and logic Charles Sanders Peirce (1893-1914), most of whom used abductive reasoning as a method for the search for truth through well-executed conjectures. The results obtained show that the semiotic object used for its analysis, from the Peircean notion, is aimed at establishing a binding semiosis between detective cases and the diagnoses of a doctor, and that the Scottish writer Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) left for posterity a hero prefigured in the fictitious characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson.