Different Ways of Taking the Evidence, II

 How does one know which way a given piece of evidence actually weighs?

Let me propose two very different ideas about that, both appropriate in their own context.

Sometimes, especially in detective stories, evidence appears to work like puzzle pieces.  Take any two pieces of a puzzle, or even half the pieces, and you may not be able to put a thing together.  All the pieces of a puzzle, however, only fit together in one given way (a fact my three-year-old is only just beginning to grasp, and one which is still beyond my two-year-old’s comprehension).  Get enough pieces together and hey presto! a picture emerges, the one and only true picture of the truth.  The family stands back and gazes on St. Petersburg Square in Wintertime or The Aztec Temple or Two Mandarin Ducks, and knows that it could not be otherwise.

Truth in the real world (as opposed to the world of art, in which both literary and physical puzzles, despite their lowly status in said world, are located) is not usually like that.