[MD] Thirty Eight

[MarshaV]

Hhmmmmm



38 Ways to Win an Argument from Arthur Schopenhauer's The Art of Controversy
by Professor David Zarefsky


1. Carry your opponent's proposition beyond its natural limits; 
exaggerate it. The more general your opponent's statement becomes, 
the more objections you can find against it. The more restricted and 
narrow your own propositions remain, the easier they are to defend.

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, "Oh, 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. Rather, understand it in some quite different 
sense, and then refute it. 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. By this circuitous route you conceal your 
goal until you have reached all the admissions necessary to reach your goal.

5. Use your opponent's beliefs against him. If your opponent refuses 
to accept your premises, use his own premises to your advantage.
Example: If the opponent is a member of an organization or a 
religious sect to which you do not belong, you may employ the 
declared opinions of this group against the opponent.

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."

7. State your proposition and show the truth of it by asking the 
opponent many questions. By asking many wide-reaching questions at 
once, you may hide what you want to get admitted. Then you quickly 
propound the argument resulting from the opponent's admissions.

8. Make your opponent angry. An angry person is less capable of using 
judgment or perceiving where his or her advantage lies.

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

10. If your opponent answers all your questions negatively and 
refuses to grant you any points, ask him or her to concede the 
opposite of your premises. This may confuse the opponent as to which 
point you actually seek him to concede.

11. If the opponent grants you the truth of some of your premises, 
refrain from asking him or her to agree to your conclusion. Later, 
introduce your conclusion as a settled and admitted fact. Your 
opponent and others in attendance may come to believe that your 
conclusion was admitted.

12. If the argument turns upon general ideas with no particular 
names, you must use language or a metaphor that is favorable to your 
proposition.
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.

13. To make your opponent accept a proposition, you must give him an 
opposite, counter-proposition as well. If the contrast is glaring, 
the opponent will accept your proposition to avoid being paradoxical.
Example: If you want him to admit that a boy must do 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," ask whether you are to understand "often" to mean few or 
many times, the opponent will say "many." It is as though you were to 
put gray next to black and call it white, or gray next to white and 
call it black.

14. Try to bluff your opponent. If he or she has answered several of 
your questions without the answers turning out in favor of your 
conclusion, advance your conclusion triumphantly, even if it does not 
follow. If your opponent is shy or stupid, and you yourself possess a 
great deal of impudence and a good voice, the technique may succeed.

15. If you wish to advance a proposition that is difficult to prove, 
put it aside for the moment. Instead, submit for your opponent's 
acceptance or rejection some true proposition, as though you wished 
to draw your proof from it. Should the opponent reject it because he 
suspects a trick, you can obtain your triumph by showing how absurd 
the opponent is to reject an obviously true proposition. Should the 
opponent accept it, you now have reason on your side for the moment. 
You can either try to prove your original proposition, as in #14, or 
maintain that your original proposition is proved by what your 
opponent accepted. For this an extreme degree of impudence is 
required, but experience shows cases of it succeeding.

16. When your opponent puts forth a proposition, find it inconsistent 
with his or her other statements, beliefs, actions or lack of action.
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?"

17. If your opponent presses you with a counter-proof, you will often 
be able to save yourself by advancing some subtle distinction. Try to 
find a second meaning or an ambiguous sense for your opponent's idea.

18. If your opponent has taken up a line of argument that will end in 
your defeat, you must not allow him to carry it to its conclusion. 
Interrupt the dispute, break it off altogether, or lead the opponent 
to a different subject.

19. Should your opponent expressly challenge you to produce any 
objection to some definite point in his argument, and you have 
nothing to say, try to make the argument less specific.
Example: If you are asked why a particular hypothesis cannot be 
accepted, you may speak of the fallibility of human knowledge, and 
give various illustrations of it.

20. If your opponent has admitted to all or most of your premises, do 
not ask him or her directly to accept your conclusion. Rather, draw 
the conclusion yourself as if it too had been admitted.

21. When your opponent uses an argument that is superficial and you 
see the falsehood, you can refute it by setting forth its superficial 
character. But it is better to meet the opponent with a 
counter-argument that is just as superficial, and so dispose of him. 
For it is with victory that you are concerned, not with truth.
Example: If the opponent appeals to prejudice or emotion, or attacks 
you personally, return the attack in the same manner.

22. If your opponent asks you to admit something from which the point 
in dispute will immediately follow, you must refuse to do so, 
declaring that it begs the question.

23. Contradiction and contention irritate a person into exaggerating 
his statements. By contradicting your opponent you may drive him into 
extending the statement beyond its natural limit. When you then 
contradict the exaggerated form of it, you look as though you had 
refuted the original statement. Contrarily, if your opponent tries to 
extend your own statement further than you intended, redefine your 
statement's limits and say, "That is what I said, no more."

24. State a false syllogism. Your opponent makes a proposition, and 
by false inference and distortion of his ideas you force from the 
proposition other propositions that are not intended and that appear 
absurd. It then appears that your opponent's proposition gave rise to 
these inconsistencies, and so it appears to be indirectly refuted.

25. If your opponent is making a generalization, find an instance to 
the contrary. 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." You retort, "Just because he is a child, I 
must correct him; otherwise he will persist in his bad habits."

27. Should your opponent surprise you by becoming particularly angry 
at an argument, you must urge it with all the more zeal. No only will 
this make your opponent angry, but it will appear that you have put 
your finger on the weak side of his case, and your opponent is more 
open to attack on this point than you expected.

28. When the audience consists of individuals (or a person) who are 
not experts on a subject, you make an invalid objection to your 
opponent who seems to be defeated in the eyes of the audience. This 
strategy is particularly effective if your objection makes your 
opponent look ridiculous or if the audience laughs. If your opponent 
must make a long, winded and complicated explanation to correct you, 
the audience will not be disposed to listen to him.

29. If you find that you are being beaten, you can create a 
diversion-that is, you can suddenly begin to talk of something else, 
as though it had a bearing on the matter in dispute. This may be done 
without presumption that the diversion has some general bearing on the matter.

30. Make an appeal to authority rather than reason. If your opponent 
respects an authority or an expert, quote that authority to further 
your case. If needed, quote what the authority said in some other 
sense or circumstance. Authorities that your opponent fails to 
understand are those which he generally admires the most. You may 
also, should it be necessary, not only twist your authorities, but 
actually falsify them, or quote something that you have entirely 
invented yourself.

31. If you know that you have no reply to the arguments that your 
opponent advances, you by a fine 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." In this way you insinuate to the 
audience, with whom you are in good repute, that what your opponent 
says is nonsense. This technique may be used only when you are quite 
sure that the audience thinks much better of you than your opponent.

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:
1. That the assertion or question is identical with, or at least 
contained in, the category cited; and
2. The system referred to has been entirely refuted.

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."

34. When you state a question or an argument, and your opponent gives 
you no direct answer, or evades it with a counter-question, or tries 
to change the subject, it is sure sign you have touched a weak spot, 
sometimes without intending to do so. You have, as it were, reduced 
your opponent to silence. You must, therefore, urge the point all the 
more, and not let your opponent evade it, even when you do not know 
where the weakness that you have hit upon really lies.

35. Instead of working on an opponent's intellect or the rigor of his 
arguments, work on his motive. If you succeed 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. You show 
him that his proposition contradicts a fundamental doctrine of his 
church. He will abandon the argument.

36. You may also puzzle and bewilder your opponent by mere bombast. 
If your opponent is weak or does not wish to appear as if he has no 
idea what you are talking about, you can easily impose upon him some 
argument that sounds very deep or learned, or that sounds indisputable.

37. Should your opponent be in the right but, luckily for you, choose 
a faulty proof, you can easily refute it and then claim that you have 
refuted the whole position. This is the way in which bad advocates 
lose good cases. If no accurate proof occurs to your opponent, you 
have won the day.

38. Become personal, insulting and rude as soon as you perceive that 
your opponent has the upper hand. In becoming personal you leave the 
subject altogether, and turn your attack on the person by remarks of 
an offensive and spiteful character. This is a very popular 
technique, because it takes so little skill to put it into effect.








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The self is a thought-flow of ever-changing, interrelated and 
interconnected, inorganic, biological, social and intellectual, 
static patterns of value responding to Dynamic Quality.

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