A red herring is a piece of information that’s meant to distract people from something important in a misleading manner. Red herrings are usually used either as a literary device, such as when an author uses a side character to divert attention from another character, or as a rhetoric technique, such as when someone responds to a question with unrelated information in order to hide their refusal to answer the original question.| Effectiviology
The burden of proof (“onus probandi” in Latin) is the obligation to provide sufficient supporting evidence for claims that you make. For example, if a politician claims that a new policy will lead to a positive outcome, then the politician has a burden of proof with regard to this claim, meaning that they need to provide evidence that supports it.| Effectiviology
Begging the question (also called petitio principii or circular reasoning) is a logical fallacy that occurs when an argument’s premise depends on or is equivalent to the argument’s conclusion. In other words, an argument begs the question if one or more of its premises assume that the argument’s conclusion is necessarily true.| Effectiviology
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence is an adage which denotes that not having proof that something exists is different from having proof that it doesn’t exist. For example, lack of research about the efficacy of a new medical treatment (i.e., absence of evidence), is different from research showing that the new treatment is ineffective (i.e., evidence of absence).| Effectiviology
A false premise is an incorrect assumption that forms the basis of an argument and makes it logically unsound. For example, in the argument “all birds can fly, and penguins can’t fly, so penguins aren’t birds”, the assumption that “all birds can fly” is a false premise (since some birds can’t fly).| Effectiviology