Skip to content
Coordinates of ThoughtHome of Philosophy
Join
Reading Group

Reading group: Toulmin’s The Uses of Argument, starting from the middle

Sam Ellery Contributor
· 6 replies · 168 views
Logic & argumentAnalyticRudolf CarnapStephen Toulmin#argument-structure#reading-group#toulmin-model#warrant
Follow

I coach high-school debate in Portland, and the Toulmin layout (claim, grounds, warrant, backing, qualifier, rebuttal) is on every debate camp handout in the country. Almost nobody has read the book it comes from. Let's fix that.

Text. Stephen Toulmin, The Uses of Argument (1958; the Cambridge updated edition has a new preface). It's five essays, not a textbook.

Plan, out of order on purpose.
– Weeks 1–2: Essay III, "The Layout of Arguments". This is the famous one, built around Harry, who was born in Bermuda.
– Week 3: Essay I, "Fields of Argument and Modals": what changes between fields (law, science, ethics) and what doesn't.
– Week 4: Essay II, "Probability": what "probably" is doing when we say it.
– Week 5: Essay IV, "Working Logic and Idealised Logic", where he picks his fight with formal logic.
– Optional: Essay V, on the origins of epistemology.

Question to keep in view. Toulmin says he wanted logic to look less like mathematics and more like jurisprudence: arguments as cases made before a tribunal. Does that model fit the arguments you actually make at work or at home? And what does it leave out?

Post under the week you're on. Lawyers especially welcome, since he basically wrote it for you.

LikeReply
Follow6 replies

Members reply here. Reading is always free.

Sign in to reply

6 replies

  1. Hamza Qureshi

    Fellow

    Weeks 1–2. As a lawyer I found the Harry example almost too natural. Harry was born in Bermuda (data); a man born in Bermuda will generally be a British subject (warrant); on account of the relevant statutes (backing); so, presumably (qualifier), Harry is a British subject, unless both his parents were aliens or he has since become a naturalised American (rebuttal). Every element corresponds to something I do in a written submission. The insight is that the warrant and the backing are different kinds of thing: one is a licence to infer, the other the facts that make the licence trustworthy.

    Helpful · 1
    1. Deepa Nair

      Fellow

      Still on Essay III. The warrant/backing distinction was the hardest part for me. My test, from constitutional law: "Article X protects this speech" is the warrant; the line of cases interpreting Article X is the backing. When opponents disagree about a warrant, they often actually disagree about the backing and don't notice. That alone was worth the reading.

      Helpful · 2
  2. Sam Ellery

    Contributor

    Week 3 notes. The big idea in Essay I is that the force of a modal word like "cannot" stays the same across fields (it rules something out), while the criteria for using it differ. "You cannot checkmate with a lone king" and "you cannot lift that weight" rule things out on completely different grounds. I'm going to use that with my debaters, who think "impossible" means the same thing in every round.

    Helpful · 3
  3. Wanjiru Kamau

    Contributor

    Week 4, from a statistician. Toulmin's claim, as I read it, is that "probably" works mainly as a way of qualifying your own commitment, a guarded assertion, rather than as a report about some quantity out there, and he spends a lot of the essay arguing with Carnap and others who wanted a formal theory of probability. I think he's half right. In conversation, yes. But in my job I need numbers that can be checked against outcomes, and "I am guardedly committed" doesn't get audited. Interesting to read a book this willing to pick a fight.

  4. Oskar Nyberg

    Fellow

    Week 5 drew me in, since I teach exactly the formal logic he is attacking. His complaint is fair against the mid-century habit of treating all good argument as approximations to deduction. Where I think he overreaches is in implying that formal logic is therefore irrelevant to "working" argument. Half the critical questions you'd ask of a warrant are questions about what follows from what. Still, reading him made me teach the first week of my course differently.

    Helpful · 1
  5. Brian Otieno Ouma

    Contributor

    Late, but a report from the prison class. I drew the layout on the board and asked the men to fill it in for an argument they had heard at their own trials. The rebuttal slot produced the best discussion I've had in two years: several of them pointed out that the "unless" clauses that would have helped them were never said aloud by anyone. Toulmin probably didn't imagine that use.

    Helpful · 2