Schopenhauer’s 38 Ways to Win an Argument — and How to Spot Them

Arthur Schopenhauer, who lived from 1788 to 1860, saw his philosophy as a critical continuation of Kant’s. He was less charitable toward Hegel, Fichte and Schelling, whom he accused of distorting what they had inherited from Kant.

His doctoral work, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, became a philosophical classic. He worked on The World as Will and Representation in his twenties, and it appeared at the end of 1818 with an 1819 date on its title page. After a brief period teaching in Berlin, he pursued much of his work independently. He connected his philosophy with natural science in On the Will in Nature, published essays on ethics and revised his major work in 1844. The essays collected in Parerga and Paralipomena finally brought him wider recognition.

He can write with striking directness. Where readers of Hegel may have to work through a long sentence before they reach its claim, Schopenhauer often puts his claim where you can see it.

Schopenhauer’s Art of Winning an Argument

The Korean edition gathers 38 stratagems from his posthumously published work on eristic dialectic, also known in English as The Art of Being Right.

The subject is what people do when they want to come out ahead in a dispute.

What Makes an Argument Look Won

The notes include fallacies and tactics that would be out of place in a fair inquiry, including personal attack. Schopenhauer records them because people actually use them.

He thought people were disposed to hold on to their position even after the reasons for it had weakened. Someone with the stronger argument can still be wrong-footed by a tactic they fail to recognise.

Schopenhauer distinguishes the art of disputation from logic. Whether a claim is true and whether someone can make it prevail in a room are separate questions. A reader can study the tricks to understand what is happening when someone tries them.

The 38 Stratagems in the Korean Edition

1. Stretch the other person’s claim beyond its intended scope.
2. Use a word that can carry two meanings.
3. Turn a qualified claim into a universal one.
4. Keep your conclusion from becoming obvious too soon.
5. Argue from premises that are false.
6. Hide the circularity in an argument.
7. Use a series of questions to obtain concessions.
8. Make the other person angry.
9. Ask questions out of their expected order.
10. Take the opposite tack to catch the other person off guard.
11. Treat agreement on particular facts as agreement on a general rule.
12. Choose a comparison that favours your position.
13. Offer two opposing claims in a way that traps the other person.
14. Assert a conclusion with brazen confidence.
15. Cloud the point at issue.
16. Use the opponent’s position against them.
17. Defend your position by making a fine distinction.
18. Interrupt the argument and redirect the discussion.
19. Move to a broader question and attack that.
20. Draw the conclusion before the groundwork is complete.
21. Meet a specious argument with another specious argument.
22. Accuse the other person of special pleading.
23. Provoke the other person into exaggerating their claim.
24. Draw a forced conclusion through distortion or false inference.
25. End the matter with a counterexample.
26. Turn the other person’s argument around.
27. When they get angry, press where they reacted.
28. Make the case to the audience instead of the opponent.
29. Change the subject when you are losing.
30. Appeal to authority in place of reasons.
31. Say the argument is beyond your humble understanding.
32. Put the claim into a category people already dislike.
33. Say the claim works in theory and fails in practice.
34. Hold the other person to a concession they have made.
35. Appeal to what the other person wants.
36. Drown the discussion in words that say little.
37. Attack a weak piece of evidence the other person volunteers.
38. Fall back on personal attack when the argument is too strong.

Reading down the list, the point becomes clear. A flood of empty words and an insult can change who appears to win a quarrel while doing nothing to establish a claim.

Political debates make some of the tactics easy to recognise. A candidate can change a question, speak to the audience over an opponent’s head or try to provoke an answer that will sound bad out of context.

You can know what a trick looks like without deciding to use it. Recognition can be enough to keep it from carrying the discussion away.

Aristotle on Choosing Someone to Argue With

The book also turns to Aristotle’s Topics. The advice there asks what kind of person makes a good partner in argument.

• In essence, choose someone with enough judgment to be embarrassed by a bad argument, who gives reasons rather than relying on authority and who will listen to a good reason from the other side. The best partner values the truth enough to concede a point when the reasons warrant it.

Book Information

The Art of Being Right (Korean edition of the eristic dialectic)

Author

Arthur Schopenhauer

Publication

10 June 2016 (Korean edition)

ISBN13

9791186137260

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