The Uses of Argument by Stephen Edelston Toulmin

By Stephen Edelston Toulmin

This is often obligatory analyzing for the argumentation lovers.

This reissue of the trendy vintage at the research of argumentation incorporates a new creation via the writer.

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To begin with, we must ask: are the differences between the standards we employ in different fields irreducible? Must the things which, in practice, make a conclusion possible, probable, or certain—or an argument shaky, strong or conclusive—vary as we move from one field of argument to another? This, one might think, was not an unavoidable feature of the ways in which we assess and criticise arguments; and certainly it is a feature with which professional logicians have been unwilling to come to terms.

Davis Cup team, or for accepting Sir Kenneth Clark’s reassessment of Piero della Francesca, or for adopting Fr¨ohlich’s theory of super-conductivity—and the question we ask will be how strong each case is when tested against its own appropriate standard. We may even ask, if we please, how the three cases compare in strength, and produce an order of merit, deciding (say) that the case for selecting Patty is watertight, the case for Fr¨ohlich’s theory strong but only provisional, 36 Fields of Argument and Modals and the case for Piero somewhat exaggerated and dependent upon a number of debatable matters of taste.

In studying these examples, how shall we begin? We can take a tip from the Punch joke quoted as a superscription at the beginning of this essay. Clearly, a man who says ‘X can’t do Y ’ is in some cases understood to imply that X has not recently done Y, is not doing so now, and will not do so in the near future; whereas some uses of ‘cannot’ carry no such implication whatever. With this difference in mind, it will be worth asking, about each of our examples, what we should think if the man to whom we said ‘You can’t do X ’ were to reply ‘But I have’; and we can add to this the further question, what sorts of grounds entitle us in any particular case to say ‘You can’t do X ’—what would have to be different for our claim to have to be rejected, and for it to prove, after all, to have been unjustified.

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