A Little Sketchy

It seems I will be spending my winter months thinking about Alaska again, for I'll have the pleasure of illustrating a picture book by Deb Vanasse . The book is titled Lucy's Dance , and will be published by the University of Alaska Press in Spring of 2011. I will post scraps of my illustration and the research behind them, trying not to muddle the cultural details too awfully. Mind you, I'm only giving you the chocolate coating of the story. You haven't seen the last of the snail fallacies, but they may enter hibernation for the winter. Potlatch Raillery, Bingo Ladies Cracking Wise Lucy's Dance deals with the fading tradition of the the potlatch celebrated by the Yup'ik people of western Alaska. The central character is a Yup'ik girl named Lucy who prods her village to resurrect the Curukaq (choo-ROO-gawk), or the Challenge Festival, also known as the Messenger Feast, or potlatch. Lucy's mother explains that the tradition is no longer recognized beca

Ad hominem is one of the better-known fallacies, perhaps because it is so common. In Latin, it means: "to the man." In American, it translates fuzzily to: "Oh yeah? Well, you're ugly." Broken down, the ad hominem argument looks like this: Person 1 makes claim X There is something objectionable about Person 1 (maybe ugliness) Therefore claim X is false Ad hominem is one of the many red-herring arguments, fallacious when it diverts attention from the core argument to focus on some flaw about the arguer. In creating my illustration, I needed a distracting character, and what character is more distracting than one of those bellowing circus-game people with the rings, bottles, and inflatable dolphin prizes? I quickly realized my vocabulary lacked a word for a purveyor of state-fair gamery, other than the generic "carney." Perhaps this is because I have never played a circus game, due to my lack of coordination and my dominant interest in spending my tick

This week's common nonsense is the fallacy known as ad ignorantium , or the Argument from Ignorance. I prefer to remember it as the Argument from Uncertainty, as uncertainty seems more relevant to the definition. The fallacy occurs when I try to prove my argument by pointing out that no one has proven it false. The flamingos in my yard are real until they melt in your bonfire. This fallacy is very much like shifting the burden of proof . . . it's taking the benefit of unproof, twisting doubt in your favor when neither side can really make a solid case. I always suspect it must take a face like Ben Kingsley 's to commandeer uncertainty in this way and take it for a pleasure drive. I just saw him in the 1996 Shakespeare-based film Twelfth Night . I thought for the first two acts that his character was an an eccentric nobleman. As it turns out, he played the role of the Clown. Maybe Kingsley's stage presence lends him authority by default, though one could also argue that

In the SG definition, "Such arguments (also called teleological) are based on a reversal of cause and effect, because they argue that something is caused by the ultimate effect that it has, or purpose that is serves." As the White Stripes put it in their song, " Effect and Cause ": "first comes an action, and then a reaction, which you can't switch around for your own satisfaction." Another fitting example from the song: "if you're headed for the grave, don't blame the hearse." I've decided to be a bit abstract in my interpretation of the fallacy. Normally, the negative space , or the space around the snail shape, is an effect of the snail. In this drawing, I have shifted the negative space to the foreground, allowing it to cause a shadow. I have effectively cut out the negative space and placed in front of a telescope. The fallacy is sometimes called the "teleological" (end/purpose) fallacy because it makes effects, o