Esrâr-ı Cinâyât and logic: On some reasonings in the first Turkish crime novel

Bu çalışmada, Türkçedeki ilk polisiye roman olan Ahmet Mithat Efendi’nin Esrâr-ı Cinâyât adlı eserindeki mantıksal yapıyı inceledik. Bu doğrultuda ilk olarak, bu kitaptaki belirli akıl yürütmeleri ele aldık. Ardından da, bu akıl yürütmeleri belirtik hale getirdik ve sembolleştirip birer çıkarıma dönüştürdük. Bunun sonucunda Ahmet Mithat Efendi’nin Esrâr-ı Cinâyât’ta kullandığı akıl yürütmelerin, belirgin hale getirildiklerinde, daha çok eksik öncüllü ya da eksik sonuçlu kıyaslar, delilli kıyaslar ve saçmaya indirgemeye dayalı kıyaslar türünden olduklarını tespit ettik.In this paper, we investigated the logical structure of the first Turkish crime novel written by Ahmet Mithat Efendi in 1884. As is known, the writers of crime novels like to use different logical reasonings in their works. These reasonings are usually making up than ordinary language and at first sight they do not appear as reasonings. For this reason we can entitle them as arguments into ordinary language. The differential feature of these arguments is that the result is coming before their premise or premises. So our aim in this paper was to find out certain logica reasonings in Esrâr-ı Cinâyât and to show whether they are valid or invalid and to specify their kind. Therefore, firstly we treated certain reasonings in this first Turkish crime novel. Secondly, we tried to become clear and symbolise these reasonings. Thirdly, we turned these reasonings into inferences. And as a result we ascertained that when the reasonings using by Ahmet Mithat Efendi in Esrâr-ı Cinâyât become clear, it can be seen that they are usually kind of enthymeme, epichereme and reductio ad absurdum