I recommend you support this because we are in a budget crisis, and we do not want our salaries affected.' The second sentence, though used to support the first sentence, does not address that topic. For example, 'I think we should make the academic requirements stricter for students. The expression is mainly used to assert that an argument is not relevant to the issue being discussed. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a red herring may be intentional or unintentional it is not necessarily a conscious intent to mislead. Unlike the straw man, which involves a distortion of the other party's position, the red herring is a seemingly plausible, though ultimately irrelevant, diversionary tactic. Logical fallacy Īs an informal fallacy, the red herring falls into a broad class of relevance fallacies.

The term was popularized in 1807 by English polemicist William Cobbett, who told a story of having used a strong-smelling smoked fish to divert and distract hounds from chasing a rabbit. A red herring may be used intentionally, as in mystery fiction or as part of rhetorical strategies (e.g., in politics), or may be used in argumentation inadvertently. It may be either a logical fallacy or a literary device that leads readers or audiences toward a false conclusion. In the mystery novel A Study in Scarlet, the detective Sherlock Holmes examines a clue which is later revealed to be intentionally misleading.Ī red herring is something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or important question.

Red herring logical fallacy examples