{"id":641,"date":"2002-05-25T17:34:06","date_gmt":"2002-05-26T00:34:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mossback.org\/archives\/2002\/05\/red-herring\/"},"modified":"2002-05-25T17:34:06","modified_gmt":"2002-05-26T00:34:06","slug":"red-herring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2002\/05\/25\/red-herring\/","title":{"rendered":"Red Herring"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\t— Biddle tells me he writes for Fortune magazine. I’d like to suggest that Red Herring<\/a> would be a good market for his style of reasoning, given this definition:<\/p>\n

\nA Red Herring is a fallacy in which an irrelevant topic is presented in order to divert attention from the original issue. The basic idea is to “win” an argument by leading attention away from the argument and to another topic. This sort of “reasoning” has the following form:
\nTopic A is under discussion.
\nTopic B is introduced under the guise of being relevant to topic A (when topic B is actually not relevant to topic A).
\nTopic A is abandoned.
\nThis sort of “reasoning” is fallacious because merely changing the topic of discussion hardly counts as an argument against a claim. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Another example: Person A makes a claim about unwed births<\/a>. Person B says person A has the facts wrong, and introduces data including marital births, independent of rate<\/a> to make his case. When person A points out the fallacy<\/a> in person B’s response, person B calls person A a “hair-splitter.”<\/a>

Red Herring<\/a> is the place for you, RiShawn.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

— Biddle tells me he writes for Fortune magazine. I’d like to suggest that Red Herring would be a good market for his style of reasoning, given this definition: A Red Herring is a fallacy in which an irrelevant topic is presented in order to divert attention from the original issue. The basic idea is … Continue reading “Red Herring”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbifyw-al","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}