The Sherlock Experiment

In psychology experiments on reasoning, the experimental subjects typically are given a number of logical or mathematical problems; the subjects' individual responses are aggregated and compared with mathematically-correct solutions; inferences based on such comparisons are then made about the underlying mechanisms of human reasoning. In contrast, the Sherlock Experiment was designed to force the members of an experimental group to talk about and work toward a common solution to a given crime puzzle thereby, hopefully, making observable how the members of the group cultivated and assessed the adequacy of their own reasoning. Unexpectedly, the central resource for the group members was not the textual descriptions of the crime and the clues that had been given to them beforehand; instead, the fundamental grounds for their collaboration were what they themselves had said and were saying about the crime. Their task and problem, for themselves, was to find a solution to the crime by discovering the coherence of their own developing discussion of it. The material suggests not only the use of such experimental settings to examine how people observably reason together, but the possibility of investigating the congregational origins of reasoning's phenomena.