On Viewing Stephen Toulmin As Awesome

It has been a while since I last read Robert Scott’s “On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic,” and this time around I was struck by the piece’s overarching ethical concern. I believe that like most elements of Scott’s essay, the attention to ethics is a result of his reliance on the work of Stephen Toulmin. While it might be an exaggeration to position Toulmin’s as a complete coup of the West’s stilted logo-centric traditions, I believe it is still worth praising the emancipatory potential of Toulmin’s work. For better or worse, this quick essay probably perpetuates the idea that the social turn is also a somehow liberal turn.

Stephen Toulmin caught the chill of philosophers when he outlined practical argument and highlighted the impersonal and tyrannical nature of formal argument. Toulmin maintained that human beings were to be the standard for judging argument, not mathematical formula (recall Protagoras’ “Man is the measure of all things.”). He believed that when people argue, they are doing so to justify conclusions that they’ve already arrived at in their own minds. He further notes that arguments are dependent on situational factors (which of course are determined by the social).

Philosophy’s fascination with certainty (which was nurtured by the work of Rene Descartes among others) focuses on how humans should ration to determine certain knowledge. Toulmin argued that such formal logic is too impractical for regular use. Perhaps more importantly, it’s always ethically questionable to tell people how to do anything, particularly how to think. Racism, sexism, class-ism, etc. have each been perpetuated by the idea that certain groups of people are more logical/reasonable/rational than other groups. Toulmin’s ideas moved (some of) academia away from the troublesome reliance on logic. His approach is both practical and person-centered – he modeled how humans actually reason in a world where probabilities run the show.

Today, the same criticisms that Toulmin hurled against the logicians of his day can be directed at Toulmin himself. His model is indeed a bit stiff and overly formal, and probably still a bit Euro-centric. However, I’d say rhetorical scholars like Walter Fisher and Wayne Booth have done a nice job of job of picking up where Toulmin left off. In summary, Toulmin was one of the first minds to take us away from a traditional model of “logic” and its destructive antecedents and consequents. Basically, I think formal logic is scary – and not just because I almost failed it as an undergraduate. Toulmin threw some of the first stones at this monster of an institution, and for that I think he deserves a post on a blog for a class on rhetoric and composition.