Design & Execution

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...