Design & Execution

It is common knowledge that if a suitor is well-liked by a girl's parents, the girl herself will most likely find him unsuitable. And absolutely: if an infant of mysterious origin appears on an orphanage/farmhouse doorstep and has qualities that set him apart from the other children, he/she is the offspring of royalty, and will one day reassume his/her rightful throne. So decrees the Law of Narrative Necessity. I stole the term "Law of Narrative Necessity" from Terry Pratchett 's Discworld fantasy/satire series, which frequently parodies popular myth. According to the L of NN, as soon as you recognize the story, you must play by its rules, be they comic, tragic, or Whedon esque tragicomic. Riding the story flow is all well in fiction, but it may be a fallacy when applied to the interpretation of everyday facts. I first encountered the narrative fallacy in Nassim Taleb's book, The Black Swan , which discusses the difficulty in predicting the influence of ran...

In lieu of illustrating another snail fallacy this past weekend, I drafted this hand-drawn logo for a friend's etsy-shop-in-progress. Said shop will sell eclectic, feathery, saloon-chic headpieces and accessories. The moment the shop goes live, I will hastily post a link for your shopping pleasure. The name, however, has since come under some dispute with the proprietor's significant other for resembling "the name of about four NYC nightclubs in nineties." Personally, I'm a fan of the name, but I could be biased. I decided to post the drawing, perhaps prematurely, because I have developed a kind of twitch that sets in if I haven't posted anything for over ten days. In between sessions of putzing around with chiaroscuro and striation, I admired the detail work of the woodblock engravings that illluminated Webster's early dictionaries. Thousands of such engravings have been whimsically arranged in  Pictorial Webster's: A Visual Dictionary of Curiosit...

The Pathetic Fallacy (PF) appears more often in literary textbooks than in philosophical ones. As a sometime fan of the gothic romantic period, I thought for a while that the PF dealt entirely with the weather, especially cases in which weather echoes the emotions of the protagonist. Lightening flashes around castle Dracula. A rainstorm gathers around Heathcliff and Catherine on the moor. The sky clamors with trumpets and heraldry during a quest for a Holy Grail (OK, Monty Python may be more romanticized than romantic). THE PATHETIC FALLACY:  the treatment of inanimate objects as though they had human feelings, thoughts, or sensations. Also known as the anthropomorphic fallacy.  Here the word "pathetic" is "non-pejorative" (not disrespectful) and means something more like "empathetic," or "sympathetic."  In an argument, the PF might be used poetically to make nearby objects seem to agree with one's point. For instance, you ate your friend...

The Moving Goalpost fallacy seemed a fitting topic for the new year, when people's personal goalposts are sliding about like ice skaters. People are lacing up, some sailing around, triple-axeling; some colliding with things, toppling, getting up again, or just inching along with a white knuckle grip on the rink edge of aspiration. Most personal goals are born ambitiously (I will no longer drink mimosas during bubble baths), then wobble a little, moving closer, allowing us to drink two mimosas, which is not as wicked as our usual five, but better than no mimosas at all (unreasonable!). The moving goalpost fallacy usually deals with the opposite: cases in which the rules tighten, goal post moves farther away, for the standard is reset by someone else who doesn't want that goal to be achieved.  The Moving Goalpost is not about building arguments, but about testing theories. It deals more with venturing into real-world testing of claims. How many times must a statem...

So continues my project of illustrating the informal fallacies using snail imagery. The argument from authority is important enough to boast two Latin names,  argumentum ad verecundiam  (argument to respect), and   ipse dixit (he himself said it). I prefer ipse dixit because it's nicely percussive, like a swear word. In my drawing, I wanted to emphasize the symbolic power of authority over a mass of people, but also the delicacy and uncertainty of the matter inside the heads of figureheads as well. I don't mean to imply here that all authoritative figures are full of hot air, but more that we don't always know exactly what's keeping them up there, unless we operated the balloon-filling station. Like a parade baloon, authority grows, dies, and moves slowly, while ideas move quickly, like little particles of helium, and we can only hope that our figureheads remain, well, full of it. Let's get down to brass tacks, so to speak, and puncture authority a bit...

When I was seventeen, I filled a one-month vacancy at a historically-themed boardwalk called Alaskaland .* All the shops were housed in reclaimed pioneer cabins, and I was required to wear a very Presbyterian-looking calico frock to maintain historical authenticity. My job was to man the counter in a historically-inauthentic soft-serve ice cream establishment called Frosty Paws. Frosty Paws' owner was a stickler for consistency. Our flavor selection ranged a whopping six flavors, and never more than four at once. The owner required that I weigh my sweet creations after dispensing them in order to assure a standard 8 or 16-oz. serving. Before the month was out, my cone-holding wrist could count to 8 oz. as well as any dealer of addictive substances. Furthermore, I had mastered the symmtrical twirl of the cone to create a regular spiral, an art which later, in the college cafeteria, lent me that charming, robotic air that every freshman covets. How would I have reacted if Ralph Wal...

The slippery slope  fallacy posed an obstacle to my creative process. Someone else has already come up with a memorable, concrete metaphor. I suppose I could have thrown up my hands and drawn a snail at a water slide, but that would have been a cop out. This blog is about (mostly) original material. The slippery slope fallacy involves predicting that one small move, say, dropping a hook, will ignite a series of actions that lead to whale-sized results. Once you give them an inch, start down that path, open that can of worms, the worms escape and chastise you for your horrible taste in canned food. The fallacy knits causes and effects together as if they are logically connected.  If they happen to be logically connected, you don't really have a fallacy. You have a valid prediction. In the case of my fish, however, fallacy abounds.  The food chain doesn't always work in nesting-doll order, from large to small. Sometimes slender lampreys feed upon the skin of larger sh...