Stephen Toulmin Quotes on Knowledge
Stephen Toulmin (1922–2009), the British-American philosopher whose The Uses of Argument (1958), Human Understanding (1972), and the late Cosmopolis (1990) supplied late-twentieth-century philosophy with one of its most influential alternatives to the formalist analyses of argument and rationality then dominant, defended the case that the standards of cognitive appraisal are themselves field-dependent — what counts as a good argument in jurisprudence, medicine, mathematics, or moral philosophy differs in ways the formal logician's universal scheme cannot capture. The corresponding argument scheme — claim, data, warrant, backing, qualifier, rebuttal — gives every subsequent argumentation theory and informal logic textbook its principal analytical instrument.
Quotes
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Attributed to Stephen Toulmin:
“An argument is an organized presentation of grounds for a claim.”
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Attributed to Stephen Toulmin:
“Practical reasoning rarely fits the pattern of formal proof.”
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Attributed to Stephen Toulmin:
“Cosmopolis is the ambition to govern thought by universal abstract reason; it is also a temptation.”
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Attributed to Stephen Toulmin:
“Rationality is grounded in practical contexts, not in disembodied logic.”
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Attributed to Stephen Toulmin:
“Modernity must learn humility from its own oversights.”
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“Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts (Princeton UP, 1972) p. 275”
Different media of publication—textbooks, monographs, quarterlies, abstracts, and ‘review letters’—have been introduced, one after another, to meet new professional needs; and the historically changing operations of a scientific profession are reflected once more in the transfer of influence from one medium to another. The ‘ invisible colleges ’ of seventeenth-century Europe were initially linked