It is sometimes called a red herring argument. Common examples are ad hominem, strawman, appeal to emotion, and guilt by association. What in the world does a fish have to do with diversion and logic? There are several stories about how the red herring idiom got its start.
All of them start with smoked herring. Herrings are abundant in the North Atlantic ocean, but they are not red. The flesh of the fish is turned red by the smoking process. As food, they are sometimes called kippers or just herring, but they are not called red herring, a fact that we will explore below.
One story about the origin tells us that it originated in the English tradition of fox hunting. Smoked herring have a strong smell so the fish flesh could be used to create trails for the dogs to follow, helping them learn to follow a scent. However, it is also sometimes claimed that fox hunters would use smoked herring to to deliberately deceive the dogs so that the hunt could be prolonged.
As such, in the following article you will see examples of red herrings, learn more about red herrings and about the red herring fallacy, and understand how you can properly respond to people who use red herrings in a fallacious manner.
This is an example of a red herring in general and of the red herring fallacy in particular, since the executive responds to the question using irrelevant information, in an attempt to evade it and distract listeners. Other examples of red herrings appear in various contexts, and we encounter them often in our everyday life. For instance, the following is an example of the use of a red herring in a simple workplace conversation:. Bob: Oh yeah, that. Here, Alex raises a valid concern, which Bob avoids addressing by using a red herring in order to change the subject.
This is therefore also an example of the red herring fallacy, since the red herring in this case is used with the intent of distracting the other person and changing the topic. Here, the interviewer asks a valid question, and the politician responds with a red herring, in the form of a vague and seemingly related statement, which is meant to distract listeners and mislead them into believing that the politician directly answered the question.
As in the case of the previous example, this is also an example of the red herring fallacy, since it involves the use of a red herring with the intention of distracting the audience in a misleading manner. Reporter: Students are organizing a march because they want their opinions about the environment to be heard. Here, the fallacious red herring is used to distract viewers from the original topic. Manufacturer: Lately, there has been a lot of criticism regarding the quality of our product.
Here, the manufacturer is being criticized for one aspect of their product quality , and decides to distract people from the issue by running a sale, and focusing on the new, reduced price of the product instead of addressing the issue for which they were criticized.
Long before refrigerators were invented, this was done to preserve the fish for months at a time. They can also be pretty smelly. As Gizmodo's io9 blog points out, it was believed that red herring were dragged against the ground to help train hounds to sniff out prey in the 17th century.
Another theory was that escaped prisoners used the fish to cover their tracks and confuse the dogs that tailed them. However, io9 notes that red herring were actually used to train horses rather than dogs, and only if the preferred choice—a dead cat—wasn't available. The idea was that the horses would get used to following the scent trail, which in turn would make them less likely to get spooked while "following the hounds amid the noise and bustle of a fox hunt," notes British etymologist and writer Michael Quinion, who researched the origin of the phrase red herring.
The actual origin of the figurative sense of the phrase can be traced back to the early s. Around this time, English journalist William Cobbett wrote a presumably fictional story about how he had used red herring as a boy to throw hounds off the scent of a hare. He elaborated on this anecdote and used it to criticize some of his fellow journalists.
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