The Art of Argument

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38 Ways to Win an Argument from Arthur Schopenhauer’s The Art of Controversy
  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.
(see link for the remaining 35) [edited]
 
  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.”
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.”
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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:
  15. That the assertion or question is identical with, or at least contained in, the category cited; and
  16. The system referred to has been entirely refuted.
  17. 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.”
 
  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
 
Just be honest. Don’t resort to logical fallacies. The aim shouldn’t be to win an argument, it should be to come close to the truth. Sometimes that means, admitting to yourself that your belief was wrong.
 
morgantj said:
Just be honest. Don’t resort to logical fallacies. The aim shouldn’t be to win an argument, it should be to come close to the truth. Sometimes that means, admitting to yourself that your belief was wrong.
Click to expand...
Right. I thought the “38 ways” was an interesting unmasking of what often goes on in discussion in this forum when the goal is not mutual iunderstanding but winning. Just how rational is rational argumentation?
 
Leela

Just how rational is rational argumentation?

Duh? :confused:
 
Argumentation is foolish as an end in itself. A document entitled 38 ways to arrive at truth would really be something to digest though.

This might be a long shot, but I think most people on this forum argue the point they love to argue - very few looking to find out if what they believe has truth in it. I catch myself doing it on ocassion. Pity, pity, I say.
 
Agreed, this is the old distinction between Sophistry and Philosophy.
One intends to win an argument at any cost, the other strives to uncover the truth.

Unfortunately, you’ll always find a hundred sophists for every philosopher, no matter where you are.
 
There’s a lot of room for immorality in methods of discussion. . . I think the ‘Art of Argument’ illustrates this.

One may not use evil methods to achieve a good goal.

‘If any man offend not in word, the same is, a perfect man.’

St. James

One might say the above methods, the opposite method is the Christian method, that is to speak simply, humbly and straightforwardsly to seek the truth. One in fact, should not care whether one ‘wins’ or ‘loses’. If one ‘wins’, one wins because one spoke the truth of Christ. If one ‘loses’, one wins, because you discovered the truth of Christ.

I have prayed at times to ‘lose’ particular arguments because it would in a certain sense be the happier for me to be proved wrong about certain unpleasant matters. But if, in such cases, I do not ‘lose’, I am happy to have witnessed for Christ and with how Christ has crafted His Providence, and to have re-explored and reconfirmed a truth.

If one is incapable of speaking the truth of Christ properly to someone else, or answering all objections – then you could say, at least as far as you explored in honestly, you did what you should have done and did not sin. There is no shame in retiring and having to research to meet certain objections, if your conscience tells you there is more to it than meets the eye – though this might not be the most practical thing to do in a public arena – there are methods for dealing with the matter on all levels properly, without conceding what is true when there can be no resolution because you lack material or ability.

Pray before speech. 🙂
 
Leela said:
Right. I thought the “38 ways” was an interesting unmasking of what often goes on in discussion in this forum when the goal is not mutual iunderstanding but winning. Just how rational is rational argumentation?
Click to expand...
I fully agree. The “Art” of argueing is designed to elicit a “winner” and has nothing at all to do with finding “Truth.”
 
Interesting.

I’m reading a great book on philosophy at the moment. Very rudimentary, but it highlights a very important element to any philisophical thinking. You must be willing to learn and you must be willing to change your mind, or you are not thinking philisophically.

He said it much better than that, but that was the general view. And he was right. Hard as it may be to do.
 
Leela said:
38 Ways to Win an Argument from Arthur Schopenhauer’s The Art of Controversy
  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.
(see link for the remaining 35) [edited]
Click to expand...
That’s hilarious! So true too. I wish there were more people who liked to discuss opposing views to learn, rather than to win.
 
Schopenahuer was an insufferable egotist who hated women and slept with a pistol under his pillow because he advocated suicide.

He was a good writer, I’ll give him that. Occasionally he had some brilliant insights in the aphoristic manner, but on the whole not exactly the person I would go to first for learning much of anything.

Read his essay On Women.

vanguardnewsnetwork.com/v1/2005/SchopenhauerWomen.htm

:rolleyes:
 
Charlemagne_II said:
Schopenahuer was an insufferable egotist who hated women and slept with a pistol under his pillow because he advocated suicide.

He was a good writer, I’ll give him that. Occasionally he had some brilliant insights in the aphoristic manner, but on the whole not exactly the person I would go to first for learning much of anything.

Read his essay On Women.

vanguardnewsnetwork.com/v1/2005/SchopenhauerWomen.htm

:rolleyes:
Click to expand...
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.” [or sexism?]

I guess he should have also noted more specifically that …
  1. When you can’t meet another’s argument intellectually, you can still make personal attacks on the person making the argument.
 
Charlemagne_II said:
Read his essay On Women.

vanguardnewsnetwork.com/v1/2005/SchopenhauerWomen.htm

:rolleyes:
Click to expand...
“Only a male intellect clouded by the sexual drive could call the stunted, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped and short-legged sex the fair sex: for it is with this drive that all its beauty is bound up. More fittingly than the fair sex, women could be called the unaesthetic sex. Neither for music, nor poetry, nor the plastic arts do they possess any real feeling or receptivity: if they affect to do so, it is merely mimicry in service of their effort to please.”

Haha my goodness.
 
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