Why do they lie and what is the truth they try so hard to hide? Let's try, Watson, you and I, if we can overcome the lie and reconstruct the truth. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay - Sherlock Holmes, Esq. Sherlock Holmes is famous for observing minute details and then being able to draw astonishingly accurate inferences about what happened. For example, upon their first meeting, Holmes immediately notices that Dr. John Watson has a military bearing, that his face is darker than the skin on his wrists, and that he holds his left arm in a “stiff and unnatural manner.” From these clues (along with his knowledge of the recent Anglo-Afghan War), Holmes famously concludes: "You have been in Afghanistan, I understand." However, the kind of "deductions" (more precisely, abductions or inferences to the best explanations) that Holmes regularly makes to solve crimes are even more impressive. In these cases, Holmes manages to discover something that (unlike Watson's military service) someone else is actively trying to keep hidden. In other words, it deals with liars and deceivers who attempt to make the world seem a certain way when the reality is actually very different. And to uncover the truth through their ruses, Holmes must understand the various ways people try to deceive others. Philosophers from Plato and St. Augustine to Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche have been primarily interested in moral questions about lying and truth. deception, such as whether it is always wrong to lie and whether lying is worse than other forms of deception. But philosophers are also concerned with the purely epistemological questions of how people can be deceived and how deception can be detected. In other words, how can we gain knowledge in a world of liars and deceivers? All cases of deception involve manipulating people's beliefs by altering the way the world appears. However, as we see when reading the Canon, deception comes in many different varieties. And this diversity is key to understanding the epistemology of deception. Thus, philosophers such as Augustine, Roderick Chisholm and Thomas Feehan, J. Bowyer Bell and Barton Whaley, Jonathan Adler (no relation to Irene), and, more recently, Thomas Carson, have attempted to classify the different possible types of deception. In addition to the numerous deceptions used by criminals to carry out and/or hide their crimes, Holmes himself regularly used deception to solve these mysteries. For example, he often disguised himself, usually as a member of the working class, to conduct his investigations with greater anonymity and often kept Watson in the dark about what was happening. He even went so far as to fake his own death when Reichenbach fell. Holmes was well aware of the value of such taxonomies. For example, he classified the various types of crime and even wrote a technical monograph enumerating the various types of tobacco ash. Jonas Oldacre, however, simply planted false evidence to suggest that he had been murdered by the unfortunate John Hector McFarlane. He didn't actually say anything false. And this distinction is important to how people are deceived and how deception can be detected. For example, if it becomes known that evidence has been intentionally placed somewhere, it immediately becomes suspicious. But it is always clear that testimony is an intentional act; some other indication is needed to cast doubt on its veracity. Several philosophers also make a distinction between deceiving someone and simply “keeping someone in the dark.” In other words, the goal is that someone.