About a year ago I decided to undertake an ambitious creative project: I would illustrate the informal fallacies using a snail motif. What led me to such pedantic subject matter? Let me start with definitions.
Informal fallacies refer to arguments that are unsound for reasons other than their formal logical structure. Check my links for a more detailed explanation. Many fallacies have latin names that I always meant to translate after hearing them tossed about on the news, such as post hoc or ad hominem. Others have more intuitive names, such as the slippery slope fallacy or argument from ridicule.
Fallacies--I vaguely recall my college philosophy course brushing past them, but my real understanding of them arrived when I taught Introduction to Academic Writing at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. There I was employed to teach freshmen how to write that amorphous animal, The Academic Essay, in a way applicable to their individual fields of study. My lesson topics ranged, often chronologically, from critical thinking to reading skills to thesis construction to ethical research to formatting style to basic grammar.
Early in the semester, before my State of Freshman Grammar Alert reached Code Orange, I'd plan my lessons around a book called Writing Arguments, which "presented a philosophical approach to writing the critical essay." It dealt with the idea structure behind writing. The book contained a lengthy appendix of the informal fallacies that I thought merited the attention of a class-length activity. I'd divide the class into pairs, or singles, depending on how much my class size had dwindled at that point in the semester (UAF had open admissions). I then assigned a fallacy to each pair or student, who would then find a way to communicate the fallacy to the class. This sort of lesson was part of a principle I called discipulus docui, or Make the Students Teach So I Don't Have To Stand in Front of Them For Ninety Minutes Wearing These Boots That Looked So Smart in the Catalog.
I worried at first that the latin names would alienate some of my students, but I was delighted to learn the reverse. Freshmen who groaned at sentence diagrams ate up latin terms like free hummus. I speculated that freshmen (or at least, the freshmen who stuck around) expect to absorb a bit of latin as part of a Proper College Education, so that when the need arises, they can complain about their roommates listening to Celine Dion ad nauseum. The problem was, though many of my students recalled the names of the fallacies, not all of them remembered what they meant. I thought that a visual aid of some kind might be useful for those visual learners, but all the examples that I could find involved verbal statements. The idea of illustrating the fallacies sounded like fun (yes, I'm that nerdy), but was subsequently buried beneath a pile of late papers.
I rediscovered my idea when I took to listening to a science-based podcast called the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. The hosts of the show promote, among other topics, a critical approach to absorbing and responding to information. The podcast often ends with a game of "Name that Fallacy." I soon realized that I was good at this game. Maybe it had something to do with all those freshman demonstrations of petitio principii as a dramatic monologue or interpretive dance. OK, none of them chose the interpretive dance option, and I'm not sure it would have gotten full credit anyway, but it would have been memorable.
After watching a few political debates on TV, I decided that the informal fallacies needed translation in to a more memorable form so that politicians could remember them too.
There--I had established the need, but I needed a style. Logically, I concluded I must illustrate fallacies using pictures of snails. My reasons were as follows:
1. I need constraints of some kind; I would never write a paper "on" fallacies, so why create a series of drawings equally general?
2. I really just like the shape of snails, and I probably spent some time doodling them in my own English 101 class . . . ad nauseum. *
Without further ado, I present the gambler's fallacy, which Wikipedia defines as follows:
"The gambler's fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy or the fallacy of the maturity of chances, is the belief that if deviations from expected behaviour are observed in repeated independent trials of some random process then these deviations are likely to be evened out by opposite deviations in the future. For example, if a fair coin is tossed repeatedly and tails comes up a larger number of times than is expected, a gambler may incorrectly believe that this means that heads is more likely in future tosses."
I have translated the "coin toss" scenario into the alternation of colors in the snails that border my playing card, and in Jack's reaction. I originally created this drawing in vibrant primary colors, as a playing card usually appears, but I have something against red and white, which remind me of grocery store signs. Also, I had the Cake song "Cool Blue Reason" in my head, maybe because of the subject matter.
This drawing is actually the third in my series; illustrations of False Dichotomy and Argument from Ridicule can be found on my website.
In case any of my students read this: no, it's still not OK to cite Wikipedia in a scholarly paper. Oddly, though, the page on informal fallacies appears to be more detailed and carefully divided than the appendix of Writing Arguments, so I'm going to take the risk. Enough pedantry for now. I've got to get out of these boots.
* These statements have no logical connection at all. Name that fallacy!
Informal fallacies refer to arguments that are unsound for reasons other than their formal logical structure. Check my links for a more detailed explanation. Many fallacies have latin names that I always meant to translate after hearing them tossed about on the news, such as post hoc or ad hominem. Others have more intuitive names, such as the slippery slope fallacy or argument from ridicule.
Fallacies--I vaguely recall my college philosophy course brushing past them, but my real understanding of them arrived when I taught Introduction to Academic Writing at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. There I was employed to teach freshmen how to write that amorphous animal, The Academic Essay, in a way applicable to their individual fields of study. My lesson topics ranged, often chronologically, from critical thinking to reading skills to thesis construction to ethical research to formatting style to basic grammar.
Early in the semester, before my State of Freshman Grammar Alert reached Code Orange, I'd plan my lessons around a book called Writing Arguments, which "presented a philosophical approach to writing the critical essay." It dealt with the idea structure behind writing. The book contained a lengthy appendix of the informal fallacies that I thought merited the attention of a class-length activity. I'd divide the class into pairs, or singles, depending on how much my class size had dwindled at that point in the semester (UAF had open admissions). I then assigned a fallacy to each pair or student, who would then find a way to communicate the fallacy to the class. This sort of lesson was part of a principle I called discipulus docui, or Make the Students Teach So I Don't Have To Stand in Front of Them For Ninety Minutes Wearing These Boots That Looked So Smart in the Catalog.
I worried at first that the latin names would alienate some of my students, but I was delighted to learn the reverse. Freshmen who groaned at sentence diagrams ate up latin terms like free hummus. I speculated that freshmen (or at least, the freshmen who stuck around) expect to absorb a bit of latin as part of a Proper College Education, so that when the need arises, they can complain about their roommates listening to Celine Dion ad nauseum. The problem was, though many of my students recalled the names of the fallacies, not all of them remembered what they meant. I thought that a visual aid of some kind might be useful for those visual learners, but all the examples that I could find involved verbal statements. The idea of illustrating the fallacies sounded like fun (yes, I'm that nerdy), but was subsequently buried beneath a pile of late papers.
I rediscovered my idea when I took to listening to a science-based podcast called the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. The hosts of the show promote, among other topics, a critical approach to absorbing and responding to information. The podcast often ends with a game of "Name that Fallacy." I soon realized that I was good at this game. Maybe it had something to do with all those freshman demonstrations of petitio principii as a dramatic monologue or interpretive dance. OK, none of them chose the interpretive dance option, and I'm not sure it would have gotten full credit anyway, but it would have been memorable.
After watching a few political debates on TV, I decided that the informal fallacies needed translation in to a more memorable form so that politicians could remember them too.
There--I had established the need, but I needed a style. Logically, I concluded I must illustrate fallacies using pictures of snails. My reasons were as follows:
1. I need constraints of some kind; I would never write a paper "on" fallacies, so why create a series of drawings equally general?
2. I really just like the shape of snails, and I probably spent some time doodling them in my own English 101 class . . . ad nauseum. *
Without further ado, I present the gambler's fallacy, which Wikipedia defines as follows:
"The gambler's fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy or the fallacy of the maturity of chances, is the belief that if deviations from expected behaviour are observed in repeated independent trials of some random process then these deviations are likely to be evened out by opposite deviations in the future. For example, if a fair coin is tossed repeatedly and tails comes up a larger number of times than is expected, a gambler may incorrectly believe that this means that heads is more likely in future tosses."
I have translated the "coin toss" scenario into the alternation of colors in the snails that border my playing card, and in Jack's reaction. I originally created this drawing in vibrant primary colors, as a playing card usually appears, but I have something against red and white, which remind me of grocery store signs. Also, I had the Cake song "Cool Blue Reason" in my head, maybe because of the subject matter.
This drawing is actually the third in my series; illustrations of False Dichotomy and Argument from Ridicule can be found on my website.
In case any of my students read this: no, it's still not OK to cite Wikipedia in a scholarly paper. Oddly, though, the page on informal fallacies appears to be more detailed and carefully divided than the appendix of Writing Arguments, so I'm going to take the risk. Enough pedantry for now. I've got to get out of these boots.
* These statements have no logical connection at all. Name that fallacy!
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