Design & Execution

At times, the Wikipedia list of fallacies seems endless, as though it will take all the snails in French butter to illustrate. Recently, I noticed that the Skeptic's Guide contains a list of its "Top Twenty" fallacies , worded in new and precise ways. This delighted me, as cross-referencing is a mischievous habit of mine. My eye landed on the false continuum. It seemed to lend itself to illustration, and at very reasonable rates, so I complied. The SG defines the false continuum as: "The idea that because there is no definitive demarcation line between two extremes, that the distinction between the extremes is not real or meaningful." Wikipedia offers the example of baldness and non-baldness. We know a bald man (or woman) when we see one, though he/she may still have a few hairs left. We probably can't name the minimum number of hairs a person can have before qualifying, yet the distinction exists. For a colorful, Grecian example of this dilemma, see the Sor...

Snail shells are almost identical in shape to cinnamon rolls. As I tweaked away at the vector art, I could almost smell those puffy confections that beckon across malls and airports with their buttery, come-hitherish aroma. I colored these snails in orange, which reminded me of the kind with orange-flavored icing. Now if only I could cause a bakery fragrance to emit from my blog, readers might associate my writing with delicious baked goods. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc , like pareidolia, deals with illusory connection. The Latin translates to "after this, therefore because of this," a phrase that nicely sums up the logical snafu. Post hoc reasoning occurs when I perceive that because one event follows another, the first event must cause the second. My favorite example of this fallacy is the restaurant bathroom visit; the waiter always arrives just after I've excused myself to the ladies room. So can I command food to arrive by visiting the ladies room? More importantly, do...

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...