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...

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...

The argument  Ad Nauseum  is not that abdominal discomfort that often accompanies watching commercial television--but it's close. It is a strategy that involves repeating a conclusion many times to urge its acceptance rather than offering proof.  The term Ad Nauseum   means surfeit  to the point of sickness . For some of us, it calls to mind, unpleasantly, eating too much theater popcorn  and before watching the owl attack scene in the movie  Thrice Midnight .  With such associations, how is anyone sold on this fallacy?   I've encountered  Ad Nauseum  in three flavors: First, a brute pummeling of repetition, a.k.a. the supersoaker approach. Here I refer to your filibuster, your parental injunctions to pack an umbrella, and yes, your Hulu commercials that might, through sheer persistence, convince you to back up your files on Mozy. Second, the subliminal approach. Conclusions may sn...

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...

This week's common nonsense is the fallacy known as ad ignorantium , or the Argument from Ignorance. I prefer to remember it as the Argument from Uncertainty, as uncertainty seems more relevant to the definition. The fallacy occurs when I try to prove my argument by pointing out that no one has proven it false. The flamingos in my yard are real until they melt in your bonfire. This fallacy is very much like shifting the burden of proof . . . it's taking the benefit of unproof, twisting doubt in your favor when neither side can really make a solid case. I always suspect it must take a face like Ben Kingsley 's to commandeer uncertainty in this way and take it for a pleasure drive. I just saw him in the 1996 Shakespeare-based film Twelfth Night . I thought for the first two acts that his character was an an eccentric nobleman. As it turns out, he played the role of the Clown. Maybe Kingsley's stage presence lends him authority by default, though one could also argue that...

In the SG definition, "Such arguments (also called teleological) are based on a reversal of cause and effect, because they argue that something is caused by the ultimate effect that it has, or purpose that is serves." As the White Stripes put it in their song, " Effect and Cause ": "first comes an action, and then a reaction, which you can't switch around for your own satisfaction." Another fitting example from the song: "if you're headed for the grave, don't blame the hearse." I've decided to be a bit abstract in my interpretation of the fallacy. Normally, the negative space , or the space around the snail shape, is an effect of the snail. In this drawing, I have shifted the negative space to the foreground, allowing it to cause a shadow. I have effectively cut out the negative space and placed in front of a telescope. The fallacy is sometimes called the "teleological" (end/purpose) fallacy because it makes effects, o...

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...

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...