38 Ways To Win An Argument - Arthur Schopenhauer

(This could be the Fox Media "how to" guide)

1 Carry your opponent's proposition beyond its natural limits; exaggerate it.

2 Use different meanings of your opponent's words to refute his argument.
Example: Person A says, "You do not understand the mysteries of Kant's philosophy."
Person B replies, "Of, if it's mysteries you're talking about, I'll have nothing to do with them."

3 Ignore your opponent's proposition, which was intended to refer to some particular thing.
Attack something different than what was asserted.

4 Hide your conclusion from your opponent until the end.
Mingle your premises here and there in your talk.
Get your opponent to agree to them in no definite order.

5 Use your opponent's beliefs against him.

6 Confuse the issue by changing your opponent's words or what he or she seeks to prove.
Example: Call something by a different name: "good repute" instead of "honor," "virtue" instead of "virginity," "red-blooded" instead of "vertebrates".

Then you quickly propound the argument resulting from the proponent's admissions.

8 Make your opponent angry.

9 Use your opponent's answers to your question to reach different or even opposite conclusions.


Later, introduce your conclusions as a settled and admitted fact.

Example: What an impartial person would call "public worship" or a "system of religion" is described by an adherent as "piety" or "godliness" and by an opponent as "bigotry" or "superstition."
In other words, inset what you intend to prove into the definition of the idea.

Example: If you want him to admit that a boy must to everything that his father tells him to do, ask him, "whether in all things we must obey or disobey our parents."
Or , if a thing is said to occur "often" you are to understand few or many times, the opponent will say "many."

14 Try to bluff your opponent.

Instead, submit for your opponent's acceptance or rejection some true proposition, as though you wished to draw your proof from it.

Example: Should your opponent defend suicide, you may at once exclaim, "Why don't you hang yourself?"
Should the opponent maintain that his city is an unpleasant place to live, you may say, "Why don't you leave on the first plane?"

Try to find a second meaning or an ambiguous sense for your opponent's idea.




But it is better to meet the opponent with acounter-argument that is just as superficial, and so dispose of him.


23 Contradiction and contention irritate a person into exaggerating their statements.
Contrarily, if your opponent tries to extend your own statement further than your intended, redefine your statement's limits and say, "That is what I said, no more."

24 State a false syllogism.
It then appears that opponent's proposition gave rise to these inconsistencies, and so appears to be indirectly refuted.

Only one valid contradiction is needed to overthrow the opponent's proposition.
Example: "All ruminants are horned," is a generalization that may be upset by the single instance of the camel.

26 A brilliant move is to turn the tables and use your opponent's arguments against himself.
Example: Your opponent declares: "so and so is a child, you must make an allowance for him."

27 Should your opponent suprise you by becoming particularly angry at an argument, you must urge it with all the more zeal.



30 Make an appeal to authority rather than reason.

31 If you know that you have no reply to the arguments that your opponent advances, you by a find stroke of irony declare yourself to be an incompetent judge.
Example: "What you say passes my poor powers of comprehension; it may well be all very true, but I can't understand it, and I refrain from any expression of opinion on it."

32 A quick way of getting rid of an opponent's assertion, or of throwing suspicion on it, is by putting it into some odious category.
Example: You can say, "That is fascism" or "Atheism" or "Superstition."
In making an objection of this kind you take for granted

33 You admit your opponent's premises but deny the conclusion.
Example: "That's all very well in theory, but it won't work in practice."


35 Instead of working on an opponent's intellect or the rigor of his arguments, work on his motive.
If you success in making your opponent's opinion, should it prove true, seem distinctly prejudicial to his own interest, he will drop it immediately.
Example: A clergyman is defending some philosophical dogma.
He will abandon the argument.


This is the way in which bad advocates lose good cases.


Tags: Schopenhauer, argument, bullshit, debate, fallacy, generalisation, straw man

Views: 17

Replies to This Discussion

"8 Make your opponent angry.

That works in bar fights,as well.
38 may indeed by my technique, as, if my opponent uses some bullshittery, I tend to go off on an impassioned rant about how they are incompetent. Of course, as I remain rather a scientist all the time, it is the only technique that I can use while later being able to go to sleep.


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