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.
Read more about this topic: Red Herring
Famous quotes containing the words logical and/or fallacy:
“Nature’s law says that the strong must prevent the weak from living, but only in a newspaper article or textbook can this be packaged into a comprehensible thought. In the soup of everyday life, in the mixture of minutia from which human relations are woven, it is not a law. It is a logical incongruity when both strong and weak fall victim to their mutual relations, unconsciously subservient to some unknown guiding power that stands outside of life, irrelevant to man.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“I’m not afraid of facts, I welcome facts but a congeries of facts is not equivalent to an idea. This is the essential fallacy of the so-called “scientific” mind. People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips.”
—Cynthia Ozick (b. 1928)