Talk:Clue

i need help finding the headline of clue

Clue, in the basic cognitive sense, cannot be subsumed under the category evidence, and needs an independent section.
Here are some idiomatic uses of the word clue:


 * In A Study in Scarlet, the letters Rache are a first clue for Sherlock Holmes.


 * Some times the criminalists in CSI complain that a perpetrator was so careful to clean up after himself that he did not leave any clues behind.


 * In Jeopardy, the answers are artfully phrased so as, at the same time, to obscure the thing being talked about but also to give players a clue to its identity.


 * That boy ain't got clue one about how to talk to girls.


 * According to the rules of mystery writing, a writer must present to the reader all the clues to the mystery that the detective notices.


 * One of the things I like about Monk is that he is able to tell what is a clue to the mystery and what isn't, and he is able to tell this when the clue is the fact that something is not present. So in the pilot episode, Monk is at the scene of an apparent suicide, and after looking around he says, "Where's the glass of water?"  I haven't got a clue as to how he does that.

I won't swear that in each example clue is used in a different sense, but I think it is fairly clear that anything that counts as a clue does so because of its status in various cognitive efforts—that is, the mental act by which one comes to recognize a pattern, a state of affairs, a reality, and so on, that has been imperfectly presented to the mind. The clue is a cognitive element that is to be acted upon by placing it in different contexts in relation to other things; it functions as a clue whether or not one succeeds in the recognition or reconstruction of the reality. Since a clue can function in the recognition of real things, and has no fundamental relation to propositions, a clue is not necessarily evidence for a proposition.

I think that the richness of the concept clue warrants its treatment in its own article.Wordwright (talk) 22:13, 1 September 2018 (UTC)