William Cobbett, February 14, 1807, Cobbett's Political Register, Volume XI When I was a boy, we used, in order to draw oft' the harriers from the trail of a hare that we had set down as our own private property, get to her haunt early in the morning, and drag a red-herring, tied to a string, four or five miles over hedges and ditches, across fields and through coppices, till we got to a point, whence we were pretty sure the hunters would not return to the spot where they had thrown off and, though I would, by no means, be understood, as comparing the editors and proprietors of the London daily press to animals half so sagacious and so faithful as hounds, I cannot help thinking, that, in the case to which we are referring, they must have been misled, at first, by some political deceiver. Ī red herring is found in the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, where the murderer writes at the crime scene the word "Rache" ("revenge" in German), leading the police-and the reader-to mistakenly presume that a German was involved.Ī red herring is often used in legal studies and exam problems to mislead and distract students from reaching a correct conclusion about a legal issue, intended as a device that tests students' comprehension of underlying law and their ability to properly discern material factual circumstances. The character's name is a loose Italian translation of "red herring" ( aringa rosa rosa actually meaning pink, and very close to rossa, red).
#Red herring fallacy in everyday life code#
For example, the character of Bishop Aringarosa in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code is presented for most of the novel as if he is at the centre of the church's conspiracies, but is later revealed to have been innocently duped by the true antagonist of the story. In fiction and non-fiction a red herring may be intentionally used by the writer to plant a false clue that leads readers or audiences toward a false conclusion. 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. As an informal fallacy, the red herring falls into a broad class of relevance fallacies.
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