Red Herring

Proverbs 22:17-19,21  “Pay attention and turn your ear to the sayings of the wise; apply your heart to what I teach,  for it is pleasing when you keep them in your heart and have all of them ready on your lips.  So that your trust may be in the Lord, I teach you today, even you, teaching you to be honest and to speak the truth, so that you bring back truthful reports to those you serve?”

 

When I think of the passage above in Proverbs I thought about some of the different fallacies that are circulating in our society, and how important it is for us to understand so that we are not trapped by them and at the same time be able to give, like Proverbs says, an answer that is ‘ready on your lips.’

 

Probably one of the most important lessons to learn is how to think logically. This, I believe is where Proverbs come in dealing with the fallacies that we face today.  Thinking properly, we also learn how to recognize bad reasoning.

 

A fallacy is an error in logic and it is something that we have much of today. This is why Proverbs is important, because it will expose bad logic and help us to logically think things through.

 

Red Herring fallacy. Whenever we introduce something irrelevant into an argument, this is known as ‘a red herring’ – we are avoiding the question.

 

A red herring is a dead fish that has started to become ripe and smelly. Dog trainers used red herrings to train tracking dogs. They would lay out the scent of a raccoon or whatever they wanted the dog to learn to track and let the trail become old, they would drag the red herring across the trail and off in a different direction and train the dog to stay on track and ignore the red herring smell.

 

So a red herring is a distracting scent trail. A red herring is when someone brings up and irrelevant topic which distracts us from the real question. We might be discussing or trying to answer a particular question, but soon find that we are off in a different direction and completely away from the original question. Someplace in the conversation ‘a red herring’ was introduced.

 

When someone introduces a red herring, he may be saying something which is true, although irrelevant. Red herrings are often good arguments. The only problem is, they do not prove the point being argued – they prove something else.

 

A red herring is a debating trick used to throw an opponent or the audience off-track. One of the problems with a red herring is the appeal to ignorance. In other words, if we cannot prove that he is wrong then we often conclude that he might be right. It is often very difficult to prove a negative. In other words if we cannot prove Martians do not exist, conclusion is that they probably do exist.

 

Another aspect of the red herring argument is in regards to irrelevant goals or functions.  This type of arguments makes a good case for what it is trying to prove, but what it is trying to prove is irrelevant to the case at hand.

 

Another aspect of the red Herring is what they call the straw man fallacy.  The difference between the straw man and the irrelevant thesis is that the speaker is trying to disprove or discredit an opponent’s position, rather than prove a thesis of his or her own.

 

An example of a “straw man fallacy” is how, for example, all religious conservatives are lumped together under certain labels like homophobes or under hate speech. To lump all those who believe that homosexuality is wrong with violent thugs who beat people up is to distort the position of those who speak out with honesty and with compassion that homosexuality is wrong and that we should call those who actively engage in it to repentance. In other words a ‘straw man’ is the type of argument against a position that is not really the position held by the opposition.

 

 

 

 

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