Toulmin dies 10 Dec 20094 Oct 2017 One of my earliest and longest-lasting influences, Stephen Toulmin, has died. There is an obituary here [Hat tip Mata Kimasitayo]. People know many aspects of Toulmin’s works, but the one that most strongly influenced me was his evolutionary philosophy of cultural change, in his Human Understanding. Although it looks simplistic now, in fact his conclusions were generally on the money, in my view. Philosophy
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I was a student of Toulmin’s long ago. I also respect what he was trying to do in Human Understanding, though I’ve been more influenced by Toulmin’s writings on causistry than any other part of his work.
I still have a copy of Foresight and Understanding from my undergrad course, Science and Society, taught by Everett Mendelsohn….
I have a much thumbed and very battered copy of Everett Mendelsohn’s Introduction to Mathematical Logic!
I too was much influenced by Toulmin in my youth and to some extent continue to be so. His The Origins of Time written with his wife June Goodfield changed the way I viewed history fairly substantially. I loved the cat fights that Toulmin and Lakatos used to have.
I could never get very far with Human Understanding, but in the past couple of years I have read and re-read The Uses of Argument, which I continue to find a very thought-provoking book.
It looks as if the writer of the obituary got someone to explain Toulmin’s ideas to her and got them a bit garbled in her notes. Sample 1: “Toulmin’s most influential work was the Toulmin Model of Argumentation. In it, he identified six elements of a persuasive argument: claim, grounds, arrant, backing, qualifier and rebuttal.” D’oh! Sample 2: “Arguing against the absolute truth advocated in Plato’s idealized formal logic, Toulmin said that truth can be relative. . . . After pinpointing absolutism’s dearth of practical value, Toulmin developed a new type of argument, called practical arguments.” Oh, dear.
Too many years ago, I got drunk with Toulmin. As the bottle neared “empty”, he started making faintly apocalyptic noises! I recall responding with an inebriated version of “WTF!” Nonetheless, I think his longtime interest in the notion of ‘understanding’ was warranted, not least because it irritated philosophic philistines.
I read only some second hand evaluations of his book(s) in Finnish main newspaper. I got an intuition that he was very very wise man I should study more but his books were not translated in finnish. Except Cosmopolis but that got not so well reputations here and I didn’t interest it. (I never forget how hard for me it was to read Dennett in foreign language).