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she has effectively avoided providing evidence on the benefits or detriments of the regu-
2
lations by trying to change the subject to that of partisanship.
One common type of red herring is an ad hominem fallacy. Ad hominem is Latin for
“to the man”; the phrase refers to the diversionary tactic of switching the argument from
the issue at hand to the character of the other speaker. If you argue that a park in your
Argument
community should not be renovated because the person supporting that action has sev-
eral unpaid parking tickets, then you are guilty of ad hominem — arguing against the
person rather than addressing the issue. This fallacy is frequently misunderstood to
mean that any instance of questioning someone’s character is ad hominem. Not so. It is
absolutely valid to call a person’s character into question if it is relevant to the topic at
hand. For example, if a court case hinges on the testimony of a single witness and that
person is a proven con artist, then his character is absolutely relevant in deciding whether
he is a credible witness.

Straw Man Fallacies
The most common example of inaccurate evidence resulting in a fallacy is one called the
straw man. A straw man fallacy occurs when a speaker chooses a deliberately poor or
oversimplified example in order to ridicule and refute an opponent’s viewpoint. For
example, consider the following scenario. Politician X proposes that we put astronauts
on Mars in the next four years. Politician Y ridicules this proposal by saying that his
opponent is looking for “little green men in outer space.” Politician Y is committing a
straw man fallacy by inaccurately representing Politician X’s proposal, which is about
space exploration and scientific experimentation, not “little green men.”

Either-Or Fallacies
®
AP TIP In an either-or fallacy, also called a false dilemma, the speaker
presents two extreme options as the only possible choices. The
Hone your skills for writing
nuanced arguments by problem with this fallacy is that it closes off any possibility of nuance
questioning everyday “false that would encourage a compromise or uncover a middle ground.
dilemmas.” Have you made For instance, consider the statement, “Either we agree to higher
any decisions based on taxes, or our grandchildren will be mired in debt.” It offers only two
either/or thinking? What
happens when you consider ways to view the issue, and both are extreme.
compromise or a creative
solution? Post Hoc Fallacies
Post hoc is short for post hoc ergo propter hoc, which means “after
which therefore because of which” in Latin. In other words, this type
of fallacy highlights that it is incorrect to claim that something is a cause just because it
happened earlier. Correlation does not imply causation. For instance, “We elected
Johnson as president and look where it got us: the stock market immediately crashed.”
Causality is very tricky to prove because few things have only one cause, and often
there are both immediate and distant causes. The mistake in the above example is to
assume that a recent political change is responsible for an economic effect that was

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