Design & Execution

The Argument from Incredulity (AFI): I cannot explain or understand this, therefore it cannot be true. The AFI is a reactive fallacy, an irrational form of rebuttal to opposing ideas. Arguing from Incredulity takes arrogance, gerrymandering the borders of possibility to suit an incumbent imagination. If it cannot fit my brain, it cannot fit the world, either --a solipsistic thought at best. A special kind of character fancies his brain larger than the world. That character is Vizzini from The Princess Bride . Vizzini: "He didn't fall?" Inconceivable!" Inigo: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." Inigo wisely sticks to semantics in his response. Inigo dabbles a bit in wordplay, and knows better than to question Vizzini's overall strategy because, well, Vizzini is never wrong. Genius though Vizzini may be ("Ever heard of Plato? Aristotle? Socrates? Morons."), his hubris and his intolerance for ...

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...

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...