Design & Execution

The topic of this week's illustration falls into my snail series, but pareidolia is not, strictly speaking, a fallacy. It is a psychological phenomenon that I feel underlies much fallacious thought, but also much creative thought. Pareidolia involves the human tendency to perceive a pattern or an organized image in a set of nebulous stimuli. The most common examples involve people seeing Elvis or the Virgin Mary among the shapes that appear on their pancakes or birthmarks, or in images of the surface of the moon. Rorschach inkblot tests make use of pareidolia in attempts to elicit material from the subconscious. Pareidolia can also invoke other senses by causing us to hear voices in radio static or heavy metal songs played backwards. Beneath pareidolia lies the urge to seek patterns and create meaning, to make a confusing and disparate world intelligible. The urge to think associatively--to seek patterns where patterns don't always exist--can be harmful or constructive. We see...

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...

A few years ago a man and his son discovered a black bear prowling outside their home in Two Rivers, Alaska. In that neighborhood, it's common to hear stories of bears smashing cabin windows, drawn by the smell of a candy-bar wrapper. In defense against such invaders, many Alaskans dispose of their garbage assiduously and keep jumbo cans of pepper spray next to their car keys. In this case, the man called 911, and shortly thereafter an Alaska State Trooper pulled into the driveway. The trooper asked a few questions, but on the whole, seemed unreasonably calm about the whole situation. With the citizens at a safe distance, the trooper called out sharply a few times, and the bear came bounding from the bushes, lunged at the trooper, and seized his leg in its paws. Rather than sinking in its teeth, however, the bear simply clung to the leg, trembling a bit. Moments later, it followed the trooper into the patrol car. The trooper's name is Ron Richards, and the bear's name is D...