Some more on Toulmin

The History of the Philosophy of Science list has been unusually active, and even more unusually fairly restrained and complimentary, in discussing Stephen Toulmin’s significance. One point, made by Avner Cohen, is that Toulmin himself had given an assessment of his work and his modus operandi in an interview in jac, the Journal of Advanced Composition, in which he summed up his impact this way:

I have shamelessly failed to pay attention to criticism of my work. I have a colleague at the University of Pittsburgh, Adolf Grunbaum, who is so hurt by criticism that if you write even a friendly three-page note in some journal he’ll come back with a twenty-one page correction of your misunderstandings of his position. He was once sleepless for a long time because Philosophy of Science Quarterly had devoted a whole issue to his ideas, and there in print were all of these papers by people who he thought were his friends and who thought of themselves as his friends, but the papers were so full of misunderstandings that he didn’t see how he would ever succeed in correcting them. It’s unfair of me to cite Adolf; he’s a nice fellow but feels he can’t let anything pass. I’m absolutely the opposite: I quite shamelessly let everything pass because I’m much more interested in writing the next book. To return to the very first thing we were talking about, I know well that I put as much work as I possibly could into making what I said plain and intelligible. And I do find that a surprisingly large number of people turn out to have read my work and understood perfectly well what I was saying. On the whole, the people who are captious are those who have their own axe to grind. They use what they take my views to be, not always in as friendly a spirit as Charlie Willard, as a whipping post of some kind or another. It’s all a question of priorities. By the time the criticisms of any one book come out, I’ve moved into another area, and I feel disinclined to go back and root around in a field I’ve left.

As Stephen Fuller said on the HOPOS list, Toulmin’s lack of impact may in part be due to this unwillingness to defend and promote his ideas. I wonder if that might be why we know of Grünbaum’s works, but not Toulmin so much. A lot of people’s awareness of his work seems to rely on Uses of Argument and his works with June Goodfield on Astronomy.

Of his ideas, the single paper that has most affected my thinking was his observation on the Lakatos and Musgrave book, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge in 1970, in which he noted of the Uniformitarian/Catastrophist conflict in nineteenth century geology that the uniformities became more episodic and the catastrophes less dramatic, until they met in the middle and that all they were arguing over were the terms used. This, it seems, is routinely the case in scientific disputes, as one side concedes in different terms what their opponents had claimed, but never really admits it.