Chapter 8, Question 1

In the story “Silver Blaze”, Sherlock Holmes gave Watson a big piece of advice. He told Watson that “when it comes to the art of reasoning, many people rely on opinion and unsupported assumptions. The difficulty, he maintains, is to detach the framework of undeniable fact from the embellishments of hearsay and reports.” This means that many people rely on unsupported assumptions to find answers without detaching the facts from rumors. Although Holmes interviewed many people to figure out exactly what had happened to the missing racehorse. He did not rely solely on the testimonials from those people and used argument by elimination to rule out the different possibilities until only one had remained. Valid proof of something is critical when making a decision because if everyone might have a different interpretation of what they thought happened and the rumor may become out of control when the truth was very simple. It is important to rely on facts and rely less on what people say.

When I was in high school, it was a little bit like the movie Mean Girls. Meaning that, there were cliques and rumors about almost everyone in the school.  I used to hear about this person and that person doing nasty things, drugs, and basically anything. I judged those people without trying to get to know them based off of what I had heard versus my personal experience of being around them. My friends started to hang out with this girl that I had heard so much stuff about and I used to just ignore her or be mean to her. There would be times when it would just be me and her sitting at the lunch table. I felt like I was forced to get to know her and try to be her friend. After a few months, she became my friend, then my best friend, then like a sister to me. I was able to learn that half of the stuff I had heard about her was all fiction and I never would have become her best friend if I would have based my decisions on unsupported assumptions.