- Stephen Edelston Toulmin, The Uses of Argument (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958).
- (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).
- Indeed, in the preface to Human Understanding Toulmin comments that the “central thesis of the present volume was first presented in my earlier book, The Uses of Argument (1958). The work I have done on the development of scientific thought and related topics during the subsequent decade makes it possible to expound it here at greater length and in a historical frame” (p. vii).
- Toulmin, Human Understanding, p. vii.
- Toulmin's attack on the notion of “deductive inference” is most clearly developed in his critique of analytic arguments; see The Uses of Argument, pp. 123–141.
- Toulmin's criticism of Kuhn's influential work (Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970]) is particularly trenchant; see Human Understanding, pp. 98–117. These criticisms deserve the attention of speech communication scholars given Kuhn's popularity in our discipline.
- These criticisms of absolutism and relativism, although well argued, are not unique to Toulmin. See, for example, Richard J. Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976); Anthony Giddens, New Rules of Sociological Method: A Positive Critique of Interpretative Sociologies (New York: Basic Books, 1976); and the essays contained in Frederick Suppe (Ed.), The Structure of Scientific Theories (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1974).
- Again, Toulmin's critique of formal systems as the foundation of rationality is not novel. See Jesse G. Delia, “The Logic Fallacy, Cognitive Theory, and the Enthymeme: A Search for the Foundations of Reasoned Discourse,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 56 (1970), 140–148; Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); and the essays in Suppe. Criticisms of Toulmin's view on this matter can be found in Joseph L. Cowan, “The Uses of Argument—An Apology for Logic,” Mind, 73 (1964), 27–45; and Dale Hample, “The Toulmin Model and the Syllogism,” Journal of the American Forensic Association, 14 (1977), 1–9.
- Toulmin's concepts of an intellectual ecology and discipline are quite comparable with the idea of “field” developed in The Uses of Argument (see pp. 8–14). The terms will be used interchangeably throughout this essay.
- Some have criticized Toulmin's use of the evolutionary metaphor because it fails to capture all essential aspects of Darwin's theory; e.g., see L. Jonathan Cohen, “Is the Progress of Science Evolutionary?” British Journal of the Philosophy of Science, 24 (1973), 41–61. However, the extent to which Toulmin's conception of the process of conceptual change parallels the process of biological evolution seems a trivial matter, since he only uses the concept of evolution as a metaphor to illuminate the focal phenomenon of conceptual change.
- Human Understanding, p. x.
- Human Understanding, p. 495.
- The concepts of working logic and field-dependence were originally developed by Toulmin in The Uses of Argument (see chapter 4).
- Human Understanding, pp. 495–496.
- Human Understanding, p. 499.
- Human Understanding, p. 499.
- Human Understanding, p. 499.
- Human Understanding, p. 498.
- Human Understanding, p. 500.
- Human Understanding, p. 500.
- Human Understanding, p. 496.
- Human Understanding, p. 497.
- The doctrine of “good reasons” has also been developed by several rhetorical theorists as a basis for establishing the epistemic function of rhetoric. For example, see Walter R. Fisher, “Toward a Logic of Good Reasons,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 64 (1978), 376–384; and Karl R. Wallace, “The Substance of Rhetoric: Good Reasons,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 49 (1963), 239–249.
- Human Understanding, p. 503.
- Human Understanding, p. 500.
- Toulmin's clear rejection, not only of the a priori status of formal logic, but of all a priori concepts is clearly illustrated in his critique of Kant, Piaget, Chomsky, and other theorists making use of universals or invariants. See Human Understanding, chapter 1.
- Human Understanding, pp. 425–428.
- Thomas McCarthy, trans., Legitimation Crisis, by Jürgen Habermas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), p. vii.
- The most complete review of Habermas' work published to date is Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978). Other useful introductions to Habermas include Anthony Giddens, “Habermas' Social and Political Theory,” American Journal of Sociology, 83 (1977), 198–212; Kai Nielsen, “Some Theses in Search of an Argument: Reflections on Habermas,” Phi Kappa Phi Journal National Forum, 69 (Winter 1979), 27–31; Trent Schroyer, The Critique of Domination: The Origins and Development of Critical Theory (New York: G. Braziller, 1973), chapter 4; Julius Sensat, Jr., Habermas and Marxism: An Appraisal (Beverly Hills, Ca.: Sage Publications, 1979), chapters 2–3; and Bernstein, chapter 4. Specific issues pertaining to Habermas' analysis of communication and argumentation are treated in T. A. McCarthy, “A Theory of Communicative Competence,” Philosophy of Social Science, 3 (1973), 135–156; and Brant R. Burleson and Susan L. Kline, “Habermas' Theory of Communication: A Critical Explication,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, in press.
- The four types of validity claims are based on Habermas' analysis of the pragmatics of speech situations. Hence, this classification system is not arbitrary; see Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas A. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), chapter I.
- Jürgen Habermas, “Some Distinctions in Universal Pragmatics: A Working Paper”, Theory and Society, 3 (1976), 159.
- Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, p. 97.
- Habermas presents a detailed analysis of the relation between types of validity claims and the associated classes of speech acts in “Some Distinctions in Universal Pragmatics” and Communication and the Evolution of Society, chapter 1. Also, see Jürgen Habermas, “Theories of Truth,” trans. Richard Grabau (unpublished manuscript, Purdue University), p. 8. Jürgen Habermas, Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), pp. 18–19.
- Habermas realizes that the supposition of mutual accountability is counterfactual in many cases. However, he develops a theory of “systematically distorted communication” which dissolves the problems associated with the counterfactual nature of this supposition. See Jürgen Habermas, “Toward a Theory of Communicative Competence,” in Recent Sociology, No. 2: Patterns of Communicative Behavior, Ed. Hans Peter Dreitzel (New York: Macmillan, 1970).
- Habermas, “Theories of Truth,” p. 22.
- Habermas, “Theories of Truth,” p. 22.
- Habermas, “Theories of Truth,” p. 18.
- McCarthy, “A Theory of Communicative Competence,” p. 144.
- McCarthy, “A Theory of Communicative Competence,” p. 144.
- Habermas, “Theories of Truth,” p. 32.
- Habermas, “Theories of Truth,” p. 22.
- Toulmin, Human Understanding, p. 499.
- Habermas, “Theories of Truth,” p. 33.
- Habermas, “Theories of Truth,” p. 33. The conditions of Habermas' ideal speech situation are quite comparable with the normative analyses of argumentative transactions presented by several rhetorical theorists. See Wayne Brockriede, “Arguers as Lovers,” Philosophy and Rhetoric, 5 (1972), 1–11; Douglas Ehninger, “Argument as Method: Its Nature, Its Limitations, and Its Uses,” Speech Monographs, 37 (1970), 101–110; and Maurice Natanson, “The Claims of Immediacy,” in Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Argumentation, Ed. Maurice Natanson and Henry W. Johnstone, Jr. (University Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1965).
- Habermas observes that both “the spatiotemporal limits of the communicative process and the limits of psychic endurance of the participants in the discourse” make the empirical attainment of the ideals problematic (“Theories of Truth,” p. 34).
- Habermas, “Theories of Truth,” p. 34.
- Toulmin, Human Understanding, p. 499.
- Habermas' analysis of irrational communication and aspects of a critical method designed to overcome such irrationality is detailed in Brant R. Burleson, “Rhetorical Criticism as the Critique of Ideology: The Perspective of Jürgen Habermas,” paper presented at the annual convention of the Central States Speech Association, 1978.
- This modification of Habermas' analysis of rationality is suggested by Burleson and Kline.
- Daniel J. O'Keefe, “Two Concepts of Argument,” Journal of the American Forensic Association, 13 (1977), 121–128.
- My notion of argument is at variance with O'Keefe's most recent explication, where arguments, are paradigmatically characterized “as simply interactions in which extended overt disagreement between interactants occurs”; see Daniel J. O'Keefe, “The Concepts of Argument and Arguing,” in Advances in Argumentation Theory and Research, Ed. J. Robert Cox and Charles A. Willard (American Forensic Association, forthcoming). Although O'Keefe's notion surely better captures the ordinary language sense of the concept, it therefore necessarily includes a wide array of phenomena not traditionally of interest to argumentation scholars and theorists of rationality. The conception of argument2 forwarded here makes the existence of argument2 contingent on the exchange of arguments1, and further assumes that interactants are sincerely committed to resolving contested claims on the merits of the advanced arguments1 (i.e., assumes the participants are “rationally motivated”). This admittedly more restricted view of arguments appears more useful in the context of developing theories of rational behavior.
- The position taken here closely resembles that articulated by Ehninger in his “Argument as Method.”
The Journal of the American Forensic Association
Volume 16, 1979 - Issue 2