HOW TO WIN EVERY ARGUMENT


Here are some of my favourite tricks from "THE ART OF ALWAYS BEING RIGHT", by Arthur Schopenhauer, from which work I source these ideas.


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TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE NO-SAYER

If you observe that your opponent returns a negative answer on purpose to the questions which, for the sake of your proposition, you want him to answer in the affirmative, you must ask the converse of the proposition, as though it were that which you were anxious to see affirmed. Or, at any rate, you may give him his choice of both, so that he may not perceive which of them you are asking him to affirm.

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QUESTION IN DETOURING ORDER

Or you may put questions in an order different from that which the conclusion to be drawn from them requires, and transpose them, so as not to let him know at what you are aiming. He can then take no precautions.

You may also use his answers for different or even opposite conclusions according to their character. This is akin to the trick of masking your procedure.

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CONCEAL YOUR GAME

If you want to draw a conclusion, you must not let it be foreseen, but you must get the premises admitted one by one, unobserved, mingling them here and there in your talk; otherwise, your opponent will attempt all sorts of chicanery. Or, if it is doubtful whether your opponent will admit them, you must advance the premises of these premises; that is to say, you must get the premises of several of them admitted in no definite order. In this way you conceal your strategy until you have obtained all the admissions that are necessary, and so reach your goal by making a circuit. It is a trick which needs no illustration.

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FALSE PREMISES

To prove the truth of a preposition, you may also employ previous prepositions that are not true, should your opponent refuse to admit the true ones (either because he fails to perceive their truth, or because he sees that the thesis immediately follows from them).

In that case the plan is to take propositions which are false in themselves but true for your opponent, and argue from the way in which he thinks. A true conclusion may follow from false premises, but not vice versa.

In the same fashion your opponent's false propositions may be refuted by other false propositions, which he, however, takes to be true. For it is with him that you have to do, and you must use the thoughts that he uses.

For instance, if he is a member of some sect to which you do not belong, you may employ the declared opinions of this sect against him, as principles.

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MAKE YOUR OPPONENT ANGRY

For when he is angry he is incapable of judging aright and perceiving where his advantage lies. You can make him angry by doing him repeated injustice, or practising some kind of chicanery, and being generally insolent.

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ANGER INDICATES A WEAK POINT

Should your opponent surprise you by becoming particularly angry at an argument, you must urge it with all the more zeal; not only because it is a good thing to make him angry, but because it may be presumed that you have here put your finger on the weak side of his case, and that just here he is more open to attack than even for the moment you perceive.

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AGREE TO REJECT THE COUNTER-ARGUMENT

To make your opponent accept a proposition, you must give him the counter-proposition as well, leaving him his choice of the two. And you must render the contrast as glaring as you can, so that to avoid being paradoxical he will accept the proposition, which is thus made to look quite probable.

For instance, if you want to make him 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 by 'often' you are to understand few or many cases; and he will say 'many'. It is as though you were to put grey next to black, and call it white; or next white, and call it black.

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DON'T LET HIM OFF THE HOOK

When you state a question or an argument, and your opponent gives you no direct answer or reply, but evades it by a counter-question or an indirect answer (or some assertion which has no bearing on the matter, and, generally, tries to turn the subject), it is a sure sign that you have touched a weak spot, sometimes without knowing it. You have, as it were, reduced him 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 which you have hit upon really lies.

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A FAULTY PROOF REFUTES HIS WHOLE POSITION

Should your opponent be in the right, but, luckily for your contention, choose a faulty proof, you can easily manage to refute it, and then claim that you have thus refuted his whole position. This is a trick which ought to be one of the first. It is, at bottom, an expedient by which an argument against the opponent himself is put forward as an argument that applies in general against his proposition.

If no accurate proof occurs to him or to the bystanders, you will have won the day.

For example, if a man advances the ontological argument by way of proving God's existence, you can get the best of him, for the ontological argument may easily be refuted. This is the way in which bad advocates lose a good case, by trying to justify it by an authority which does not fit it, when no fitting one occurs to them.

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STATE A FALSE SYLLOGISM

Your opponent puts forward a proposition, and by false inference and distortion of his ideas you force from it other propositions which it does not contain and he does not in the least mean; better yet, which are absurd or dangerous. It then looks as if his proposition gave rise to others which are inconsistent either with themselves or with some acknowledged truth, and so it appears to be in directly refuted.

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MAKE HIM EXAGGERATE

Contradiction and contention irritate a man into exaggerating his statement. By contradicting your opponent you may drive him into extending beyond its proper limits a statement which, at all events within those limits and in itself, is true; and when you refute this exaggerated form of it, you look as though you had also refuted his original statement. Contrarily, you must take care not to allow yourself to be misled by contradiction into exaggerating or extending a statement of your own. It will often happen that your opponent will himself directly try to extend your statement further than you meant it; here you must at once stop him, and bring him back to the limits which you set up: 'that's what I said, and no more'.

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COUNTER WITH AN ARGUMENT AS BAD AS HIS

When your opponent uses a merely superficial argument and you see through it, you can, it is true, refute it by setting forth its captious character. But it is better to meet him with a counter-argument which is just as superficial, and so dispose of him. For it is with victory that you are concerned, and not with truth. If, for example, he adopts an argument that only applies to you, it is sufficient to take the force out of it by a counter-argument that applies only to him. In general, it is shorter to take this course if it is open to you.

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GENERALIZE THE MATTER, THEN ARGUE AGAINST IT

Should your opponent expressly challenge you to produce any objection to some particular point in his argument and you have nothing much to say, you must try to give the matter a general turn, and then talk against that. If you are called upon to say why a particular physical hypothesis cannot be accepted, you may speak of the fallibility of human knowledge, and give various illustrations of it.

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DRAW CONCLUSIONS YOURSELF

When you have elicited all your premises, and your opponent has admitted them, you must refrain from asking him for the conclusion, but draw it at once for yourself. In fact, even though one or other of the premises should be lacking, you may take it as though it too had been admitted, and draw the conclusion.

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CLAIM VICTORY DESPITE DEFEAT

This, which is an impudent trick, is played as follows. When your opponent has answered several of your questions without the answers turning out favourable to the conclusion at which you were aiming, advance the desired conclusion –– although it does not in the least follow –– as though it had been proved, and proclaim it in a tone of triumph.

If your opponent is shy or stupid, and you yourself possess a great deal of impudence and a good voice, the trick may easily succeed.