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Translation: "Ignorance of refutation", Latin.Morris Engel, With Good Reason: An Introduction to Informal Fallacies (6th edition, 2000), p. All of these aliases, except for "ignoratio elenchi" but including "red herring", come from: S.This is too wide to be useful, so I will follow Aristotle in restricting it to non-linguistic fallacies, excluding those where the irrelevance is disguised by ambiguity or vagueness. However, Aristotle classifies "ignorance of refutation" as a language-independent fallacy, though he does say: "One might, with some violence, bring this fallacy into the group of fallacies dependent on language as well." 7 However, this would make Red Herring so wide that just about every fallacywith the exception of Begging the Questionwould be a subfallacy of it. Many other types of fallacy involve irrelevance: for instance, in fallacies of ambiguity, the premisses are logically irrelevant to the conclusion, but this fact is disguised by ambiguous language.When logical relations are immediately obvious, proofs are usually considered unnecessary. This is why proofs are sometimes surprising: a logical proof shows that the conclusion is logically related to the premisses, even though this fact may not have been apparent. Moreover, not all logical relations are obvious, so that a logical relationship may not cause a subjective feeling of relatedness. 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.
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Both types are vague in that there are no precise, language-independent definitions of semantic or causal relevance.Īnother ambiguity of the term "relevance" is that logical relevance can be confused with psychological relevance. It is ambiguous in that deductive and inductive reasoning seem to involve distinct types of relevance: Deductive relevance is semantic in nature, whereas inductive relevance is causal.
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As with all of Aristotle's original fallacies, its application has widened to include all arguments, not just refutations or those occurring in the context of a debate. The ignorance involved is either ignorance of the conclusion to be refutedeven deliberately ignoring itor ignorance of what constitutes a refutation, so that the attempt misses the mark. It is often known by the Latin name "ignoratio elenchi", which is a translation of Aristotle's Greek phrase for "ignorance of refutation". This fallacy is one of Aristotle's thirteen fallacies identified in his pioneering work On Sophistical Refutations, which dealt with fallacious refutations in debate. By extension, it applies to any argument in which the premisses are logically irrelevant to the conclusion. This frequently occurs during debates when there is an at least implicit topic, yet it can be easy to lose track of it. In the context of argumentation, a red herring is something which distracts the audience from the issue in question. Thus, in general, a "red herring" is anything that can be used to distract attention 5. According to one story 3, dragging a dried, smoked herring, which is red in color, across the trail of the fox would throw the hounds off the scent 4. The name of this fallacy comes from the sport of fox hunting. Subfallacies: Appeal to Consequences, Bandwagon Fallacy, Emotional Appeal, Genetic Fallacy, Guilt by Association, Straw Man, Two Wrongs Make a Right Etymology: Taxonomy: Logical Fallacy > Informal Fallacy > Red Herring Alias 1: Befogging the Issue, Diversion, Ignoratio Elenchi 2, Ignoring the Issue, Irrelevant Conclusion, Irrelevant Thesis