Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

11 Statistics and the Inference to the Best Explanation: Living Without Complexity? 171
will not play an important part. Let us go back to the issue we ended with in the
previous paragraph: is there a case for more complexity? Again I will draw some
evidence for this from another crime story (of the Morse-type).
What I have in mind can be found in an episode of the French series ‘Maigret’
(another example of the Morse-type). In ‘Maigret et le clochard’ 3 the story is told
of an attempted murder of a tramp: While he was sleeping under the Pont Marie,
someone had hit ‘Doc’ over the head and tossed him into the Seine to drown, but
a couple of Belgian bargemen nearby had fished him out in time to save him. His
identity card revealed that he is François Keller, from Mulhouse, where, coincidentally,
Mme Maigret’s sister lives. Thus Maigret learns that he had been a doctor
there, left his wife and daughter and gone off to Gabon, in Africa, to work ‘like
Dr. Schweitzer’. But things hadn’t gone the way he had hoped, and for the past
15 years or more, he had been a clochard in Paris, sleeping under the bridges, working
as a sandwich man to buy his bottle of wine. Maigret interviews his daughter
and mother, but there seems to be no motive or contact. He goes down the Seine to
find the bargeman again, and learns that his wife’s father had owned the barge until
he had drowned in the Seine 2 years before, near the bridge at the Quai de la Rapée,
where Doc had slept at that time (though not since). The former owner of the barge
used to beat his daughter, and when he found out that she was having a relationship
with the present bargeman, Jef van Houtte, the situation became unbearable. Though
the drowning of this man was labelled ‘accidental death’, Maigret is convinced that
the bargeman Jef van Houtte is guilty. Van Houtte denies all, and Doc is no help –
he refuses to say anything. Maigret is finally forced to let van Houtte go, but a few
months later a chance comment by Doc that ‘it’s impossible to pass judgment’ convinces
Maigret that he was right, though Doc maintains that he had said nothing.
Clochards have their own idea of justice and do not want to get involved in other
people’s affairs. Here we have a case where the kind of investigation that Maigret
conducts is stopped, because no witnesses (who are willing to speak) come forward.
In a way he gives up due to the daughter’s situation (before her father ‘drowned’)
feeling that the father has received ‘justice’ and that possible ‘injustice’ would result
from further efforts to clear things up completely. Maigret seems to be satisfied by
his investigation. He is willing to accept no for an answer in view of the greater
good. He did not continue his search for more physical evidence, nor did he put
more pressure on the witness. He left things as they were, because understanding
more (either about ‘how it worked’ or ‘why’) would put him in a difficult position.
Thus he has to live with this and bear the burden of not intervening further and seeking
to do justice ‘for its own sake’. Here one is tempted to say that following the
simple logic of crime and punishment can create more injustice; at the same time
one could argue that leaving things as they are is the ‘simpler’ answer. Who lives
under the bridges is invisible, but sees everything. They and others should be left
alone. To live with this (evidently a case of a different kind of complexity) may be
more than many are inclined to do. It foregrounds what ‘justice’ is about and moreover
that simple facts are important (which is as a consequence of complexity often
forgotten). One may want to compare this more generally with discussions about
social justice where a lot is made of inclusion and exclusion but remains oblivious