Becoming Sherlock Holmes

Can a person become like Sherlock Holmes with the powers of critical thinking? Surely it is possible. First of all, Holmes has a number of skills that are part of critical thinking skill set. Of course, he is good at logic. He checks his sources and information he gets. He also relies on hard evidence, often acquired by himself. He is probably good at controlling his mind, so he may apply metacognition in his work. From my impression of the stories about him he also changes his beliefs when he get new information.

Of course, Holmes has a number of other skills, not related to critical thinking, but probably related to his work or hobbies. And you may want to learn how to play violin only to appear like him. But if you want to think like Holmes learning critical thinking may help.

You may also ask, should I just take a list of his skills from a character’s biography and begin to learn and train them? It may work too, but I believe learning critical thinking is a more systematic approach. You probably will learn some skill Holmes doesn’t have, but you will understand the whole skill set better thanks to metacognition aspects.

In the same time you can apply a similar approach to other detectives, real and fictional. Most of them should have similar skills to solve crimes. So if you wouldn’t like to be like Sherlock Holmes, you can try to be like Dupin or Poirot. And if crime-related professions don’t look appealing you can always use famous scientists as role models. I believe most of good scientist use critical thinking in different forms just because skills from this area are needed to successfully apply the scientific method.

One can even say that critical thinking is just a proper thinking or systematic thinking. Or it is just a good thinking. It may be not exactly true, but as critical thinking can improve various thinking processes, I still can say it is kind of a good thinking. Good in a metacognitive way, because it has a potential to affect most of things that happens in human mind. But it also depends on each and every individual how effective he or she can use critical thinking.