Thinker · TH-0390
Stephen Toulmin
Stephen Toulmin was a British-born philosopher who studied at Cambridge, taught in England and spent the second half of his career at American universities.…
On the Coordinates: 4.2 Informal Logic · 4.2.2 Argumentation Theory
Also known as Stephen Edelston Toulmin
1922 – 2009 · London, Cambridge, Oxford, Leeds; later Chicago, Northwestern and Los Angeles
Traditions: Analytic
Stephen Toulmin was a British-born philosopher who studied at Cambridge, taught in England and spent the second half of his career at American universities. Dissatisfied with formal logic as a model of how people actually reason in law, science and everyday life, he proposed a layout of arguments built from claims, grounds, warrants, backing, qualifiers and rebuttals. His model became a foundation of informal logic, argumentation theory and the teaching of rhetoric and critical thinking.
Key ideas
- Real arguments are better modelled on legal reasoning than on geometric proof.
- A warrant licenses the step from grounds to claim, and its backing varies from field to field.
- Qualifiers and rebuttals make room for arguments that are strong without being deductively certain.
- Standards of good reasoning are partly field-dependent rather than fixed by a single formal logic.
Major works
- An Examination of the Place of Reason in Ethics (1950)
- The Uses of Argument (1958)
- The Abuse of Casuistry (1988, with Albert R. Jonsen)
- Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (1990)
In the conversation
- Question What is “defeasible” reasoning, and why do people say most good arguments aren’t valid?
- Reading group Reading group: Toulmin’s The Uses of Argument, starting from the middle
In the Coordinates
The questions of philosophy where Stephen Toulmin takes a place, from The Coordinates of Thought.
- 4.2 Informal Logic Why does formal logic tell you so little about whether an argument is any good?
- 4.2.2 Argumentation Theory What does an argument have to do, besides be valid?