Red Herring

[Goat]

Red Herring
Alias:
Ignoratio Elenchi ("ignorance of refutation", Latin)

Irrelevant Thesis
Type: Informal Fallacy
Etymology:
The name of this fallacy comes from the sport of fox hunting in which a dried, smoked herring, which is red in color, is dragged across the trail of the fox to throw the hounds off the scent. Thus, a "red herring" argument is one which distracts the audience from the issue in question through the introduction of some irrelevancy. This frequently occurs during debates when there is an at least implicit topic, yet it is easy to lose track of it. By extension, it applies to any argument in which the premisses are logically irrelevant to the conclusion.

Exposition:
This is the most general fallacy of irrelevance. Any argument in which the premisses are logically unrelated to the conclusion commits this fallacy.

History:
This fallacy is often known by the Latin name "Ignoratio Elenchi", which translates as "ignorance of refutation". The ignorance involved is either ignorance of the conclusion to be refuted—even deliberately ignoring it—or ignorance of what constitutes a refutation, so that the attempt misses the mark. This explanation goes back to Aristotle's On Sophistical Refutations, the focus of which is fallacious refutations in debate. As with all of Aristotle's original fallacies, its application has widened to all arguments.

Of course, fallacies of ambiguity involve irrelevance, in that the premisses are logically irrelevant to the conclusion, but this fact is disguised by ambiguous language. However, Aristotle classifies Ignoratio Elenchi as language-independent, though he does say:

"One might, with some violence, bring this fallacy into the group of fallacies dependent on language as well." (Section 1, Part 5; W. A. Pickard-Cambridge, translator).
But this would make Ignoratio Elenchi so wide that just about every fallacy—with the exception of Begging the Question—would be a subfallacy of it. This is too wide to be useful, so I will follow Aristotle in restricting it to non-linguistic fallacies, excluding those disguised by ambiguity or vagueness.

Exposure:
Logical relevance is itself a vague and ambiguous notion. It is ambiguous in that different types of reasoning involve distinct types of relevance. It is vague in that there is little agreement among logicians about even deductive relevance, with logicians divided into different camps, so-called "relevance" logicians arguing for a more restrictive notion of logical relevance than so-called "classical" logicians.

Another ambiguity of the term "relevance" is that logical relevance can be confused with psychological relevance. The fact that two ideas are logically related may be one reason why one makes you think of the other, but there are other reasons, and the stream of consciousness often includes associations between ideas that are not at all logically related. Moreover, not all logical relations are obvious, so that a logical relationship may not cause a psychological relationship at all.

Because it is the most general fallacy of irrelevance, most fallacious arguments will be identified as some more specific type of irrelevancy.

Subfallacies:
Appeal to Consequences
Bandwagon Fallacy
Emotional Appeal
Genetic Fallacy
Guilt by Association
Straw Man
Two Wrongs Make a Right
Sources:
Aristotle, On Sophistical Refutations
S. Morris Engel, Analyzing Informal Fallacies (Prentice-Hall, 1980), pp. 95-99.

 

[Goat]

Red herring
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Look up red herring in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.A red herring, also referred to as a kipper, is a dried, smoked, herring. The curing process turns the fish red.

This sense of the phrase can be dated to the mid seventeenth century, and is used by Samuel Pepys in his diary for the entry 28th of February 1660 "Up in the morning, and had some red herrings to our breakfast, while my boot-heel was a-mending, by the same token the boy left the hole as big as it was before."[1]

The phrase red herring has a number of metaphorical senses that share the general sense of something being a diversion from the original objective:

a type of logical fallacy in which one purports to prove one's point by means of irrelevant arguments. See Ignoratio elenchi.
in detective work, mystery fiction, and puzzle-solving, a false clue which leads investigators, readers, or solvers towards an incorrect solution.
in politics, a minor or even phony issue trumped up as being of great importance, in order to influence voters to vote for one party or candidate and against the other, or distract from more important issues that might help the opposing party.
in literature, a plot device intended to distract the reader from a more important event in the plot, usually a twist ending. See also MacGuffin.
in adventure games, an item or object of no practical use; its purpose may be to frustrate the gamer who tries to find the intended use for it. Famous examples are the chainsaw of Maniac Mansion and the actual red herring (although this fish proved useful...) in the original Monkey Island game. Some red herrings exist because some secondary plots or puzzles that existed in drafts were removed from the latest version of the games, but some of the items relevant to those puzzles were forgotten and made their way into the game.
The phrase may have originated from the practice of saving a hunted fox by dragging a red herring across its trail to cause the pursuing hounds to lose the true scent and follow the false trail of herring odour instead. In this context the [Oxford English Dictionary] records its first written use occuring in 1686 "To draw a red herring across the track". There are however reasons to question this attribution of the metaphor.[2] There also is a nursery rhyme, 'The Man in the Wilderness', in which a man answers the question of how many strawberries grew in the sea with 'As many as red herrings grew in the wood'.

Red herring can also refer to:

in finance, a preliminary prospectus for an offering of stock, so called for the notice in red type required by law at the top of the front page
a brief for venture capitalists to tempt them into following up with investment in the business plan
Red Herring, a business magazine founded in the dot-com boom of the 1990s
Red Herring Surf, a brand of surfgear in Tasmania
Red Herring, an artists collective based in Brighton on the south coast of England founded in 1984, seen as one of the pioneers of the establishment of artist run studio organisations in Great Britain
Red Herring Theatre Ensemble, a professional theatre company in Columbus, Ohio [1]
a radio control "flying-wing" glider made by Liftworx.
a character in A Pup Named Scooby Doo. Red Herring is a red headed child who never commits the crime but is always Freddy's guess as to who did it. He then appears to profess his innocence and beat Freddy up.
This is a disambiguation page: a list of articles associated with the same title. If an internal link referred you to this page, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.



[edit]
References
↑ Pepys Samuel (1893). The Diary of Samuel Pepys M.A. F.R.S.. (html) Samuel Pepys' Diary. URL accessed on February 21, 2006.
↑ Quinion, Michael (2002). The Lure of the Red Herring. (html) WorldWideWords. URL accessed on February 20, 2006.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring"

 

[Goat]

THE LURE OF THE RED HERRING
Do I smell a rat?
There has been a slightly puzzled discussion on the Usenet newsgroup alt.usage.english concerning the origins of the metaphor red herring, meaning “an attempt to distract attention from the real questionâ€. This expression is puzzling because it has lost its link to its origins now that the real red herrings are as rare as hen’s teeth even in their native lands. But they were once extremely common. In fact, for several hundred years, until twentieth-century overfishing terminally depleted their stocks, the herring was easily the most important fish species caught in the North Sea and the Baltic. The first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in 1771, says:
The herring-fishery is begun both by the English and Dutch towards the latter end of June; and the Dutch alone employ no less than one thousand ships therein ... from forty-five to sixty ton each. The problem with herrings was distribution. They don’t keep—even within 24 hours of being caught their flavour and texture have begun to deteriorate badly. Drying them naturally in currents of air, which was the easiest method of preservation, employed for centuries by the Scandinavians to produce their stokkfish (dried cod), doesn’t work with the oily herring and other methods had to be found.
Several ways to preserve the fish have been developed in various places, all significantly different, which have bequeathed us a separate term for each product. The methods share a common feature of smoking and salting: the differences lie in the type, combination and duration of the processes. One was a speciality of Norfolk, especially the major fishing port of Yarmouth, and became known as the Yarmouth bloater (bloater possibly deriving from the Old Norse blautr, meaning “soft; freshâ€). Further north the herring (and other fish, particularly salmon) were preserved by splitting and gutting, rubbing them with salt, pepper and spices and then curing them over oak smoke in a smokehouse or smokery to produce a kipper (a name which may come from that given to the male herring in the breeding season, when it develops a beak called the kip). A rather less well-known type was the buckling, which was gutted and beheaded, salted and hot smoked in a special oven so that it was cooked as much as smoked (the name only appears at the beginning of this century and apparently comes from the German bückling, a term applied to the bloater).
The fourth type, the oldest, is our red herring. This was heavily salted and then smoked over a fire for a substantial period, often up to 48 hours, so that it dried out, turned a deep brownish red and became almost as hard as a board. Here’s the Britannica again:
Herrings are put into a tub with salt or brine, where they lie for twenty-four hours, and are then taken out and put into wicker baskets and washed. After this, they are spitted on sharp wooden spits, and hung up in a chimney, built for that purpose, at such distances, that the smoke may have free access to them all. These places will hold ten or twelve thousand at a time; and they kindle billets on the floor in order to dry them. This done, they shut the doors, having before stopped up all the air-holes. This they repeat every quarter of an hour, insomuch that a single last of herrings requires five hundred billets to dry them. Such preserved fish would keep for months (and indeed they were transported in barrels to provide protein on long sea voyages) but were inedible in this state and needed to be soaked to soften them and remove the salt before they could be cooked. Together with bacon, they were for centuries one of the staples of the poor person’s diet; a slang term for them was capon, expressing a wry joke about their value and position in the diet. There’s a proverb which dates from medieval times: neither fish, nor flesh, nor good red herring, meaning in essence “neither one thing nor another; not fitting into any known categoryâ€. The full sense of this now rather opaque saying is: “neither fresh fish for the clergy, nor meat for the mass of people, nor red herrings for the poorâ€. But even in larger households they were a common item for consumption on Fridays and other meatless days and during Lent. A related form was the white herring, which was salted without being smoked.
Yet another form was eaten fresh. This was whitebait, the fry of the herring, often mixed with young fish of other species such as sprats, gobies, weavers, and pipefish, so named because they were silver and were indeed often used as bait. These were caught in the Thames estuary in spring—usually from mid-May onwards—and were regarded as an exquisite delicacy. Reports speak of plates piled high with hundreds of tiny fish, eaten with brown bread and the best hock. So famed were they that a tradition grew up in the nineteenth century of the ministers of the government holding a whitebait dinner at the Ship tavern in Greenwich during the Parliamentary recess on Trinity Sunday (the Sunday after Whit Sunday). It was almost a rite of spring, a perpetuation of a simpler celebration that had already existed for at least a century to commemorate the completion of engineering works further downriver at Dagenham to stop flooding. These dinners became a byword for gargantuan excess and were discontinued in 1894 at the end of Gladstone’s last Liberal administration.
One key characteristic of red herrings, apart from their colour, was their strong smell, so much so that one use for them on occasion was to train hounds to follow a scent. The OED quotes Cox’s Gentlemen’s Recreations of 1686:
The trailing or dragging of a dead Cat, or Fox, (and in case of necessity a Red-Herring) three or four miles ... and then laying the Dogs on the scent. But this seems not to have been standard practice: huntsmen much preferred to expose young hounds to the scent of the fox itself, for obvious reasons.
All the dictionaries and reference books I have consulted suggest that the metaphor grew up because a red herring was used, not to lay a scent, but to confuse one; in particular, Brewer explicitly says that red herrings were used to confuse the hounds chasing a fox. But what that entry leaves unsaid is any clue to who was supposed to be laying this false trail, or why. It seems to suggest that an early group of hunt saboteurs were at work. Though there was much opposition to fox hunting in England from the beginning of the nineteenth century, for ethical reasons, this did not extend so far as I can discover to organised attempts to spoil a day’s sport. There were cases of physical violence, true, but they were more likely to be by disgruntled farmers stoning hounds or assaulting huntsmen for crossing their land and spoiling the crops (a frequent source of discontent). In the half dozen books on aspects of the history of fox hunting I have searched out, there is not one reference to the use of a red herring to lay a false scent.
My suspicions about this source for the metaphor are fuelled by the date of the first citation for it in the OED, which is 1884. This seems rather late, considering how long red herrings had by then been in common use, and how long fox hunting had been an organised gentlemanly pursuit. Do we have here an example of a metaphor arising through some allusion known then but now lost to common knowledge, but which Brewer has misunderstood?
Or is that argument just a red herring?