Red Herring - Logical Fallacy

Logical Fallacy

As an informal fallacy, the red herring falls into a broad class of relevance fallacies. Unlike the strawman, which is premised on a distortion of the other party's position, the red herring is a seemingly plausible, though ultimately irrelevant diversionary tactic. According to the Oxford English Diction, a red herring may be intentional, or unintentional, it does not necessarily mean a conscious intent to mislead.

The expression is mainly used to assert that an argument is not relevant to the issue being discussed. For example, "I think that we should make the academic requirements stricter for students. I recommend that 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.