On the consistency of Sherlock Holmes’ old maxim: A logical and neurocomputational approach

Abstract

Natural languages can express some logical propositions that humans are able to understand. We illustrate this fact with a famous text that Conan Doyle attributed to Holmes: “It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”. This is a subtle logical statement usually felt as an evident true. The problem we are trying to solve is the cognitive reason for such a feeling. We postulate here that we accept Holmes’ maxim as true because our adult brains are equipped with neural modules that perform naturally modal logical computations.