Who wrote, "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains no matter how improbable, must be the truth"?

"Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains no matter how improbable, must be the truth" is a quote that was written by Arthur Conan Doyle. This quotation was written by Doyle, and put in the mouth of Sherlock Holmes, a fictional private detective created by Doyle.

What it means is if the truth is limited to either a or b or c, and you investigate a and b and find they are both impossible, then c must be true. You don’t need a separate investigation to find that out. You have eliminated a and b because they are impossible, so the only thing remaining must be true.

History and research shows us that knowledge works like this: if the truth is a or b or c, and d=don’t know, and you find that a and b are impossible… the answer to accept is d, even though we do not know that c is impossible.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle could have stated the principle as follows:

"Once you eliminate everything that is not the truth, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." We can see the difference. Even if "truth" is seen as subjective and thus subject to interpretation, we can then say we have an unquestionable or at least self-consistent concept of truth. "Not the truth" and "truth" are logical opposites, so the revised quote starts to make more logical sense.