Solving mysteries, by William & Adso
The following is an excerpt from The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco's debut novel from 1980. The story is set in an Italian monastery in 1327, and is an intellectually heady murder mystery doused in symbolism and linguistic ambivalence. Two characters, William of Baskerville and Adso of Melk, are conversing about using deductive reasoning to solve mysteries.
“But what have horns to do with anything?” I asked impatiently. “And why are you concerned with animals having horns?”
“I have never concerned myself with them…”
When I first read this book almost seven years ago, I remember reading these lines with awe (I was reading my first books on the philosophy of science then). Like a fool on whom common sense was then lost but somehow not their meaning itself, I memorized the lines, and then promptly forgot the context in which they appeared. While randomly surfing through the web today, I found them once more, so here they are. They belong to the chapter titled "In which Alinardo seems to give valuable information, and William reveals his method of arriving at a probable truth through a series of unquestionable errors."
