-
Period: to
Stephen Toulmin
Stephen Toulmin was born in London, England in 1922 and died in Los Angeles California in 2009 -
Education and how he started
Toulmin earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from King's College, Cambridge, where he was a Cambridge Apostle. Soon after, Toulmin was hired by the Ministry of Aircraft Production as a junior scientific officer, first at the Malvern Radar Research and Development Station and later at the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Germany. -
Earned more degrees
After WW2 Toulmin returned to England to earn a Master of Arts degree and PhD in Philosophy from Cambridge University -
Published his dissertation as An Examination of the Place or Reason in Ethics
This publishing centers on the question of what makes a particular set of facts that bear on a moral decision a “good reason” for acting in a particular way. The author contends that he has no interest in a circular argument to the effect that a “good reason” is one that supports the kind of act he would regard as a “good act”; his task is to clarify the nature of moral reasoning and the kind of logic that goes into it. https://www.enotes.com/topics/an-examination-place-reason-ethics -
Book: The Uses of Argument
In "The Uses of Argument" Toulmin investigated the flaws of traditional logice. It introduced a number of concepts that have become popular in argumentation theory,, such as data, claim, warrant, backing, force, feld, and most fundamentally, the concept of a "logical type" -
The Toulmin Model
Toulmin created a model as a way to develop, analyze, adn categorize arguments. The model consisted of s parts; claim, data, warrant, backing, modality, and rebuttal https://www.thoughtco.com/toulmin-model-argument-1692474 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWnEbMZ0IaA -
Book: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts
This book examined the cases and the processes of conceptual change. In the book Toulmin uses a novel comparison between conceptual change and Charles Darwin's model of biological evolution to analyse the process of conceptual change as an evolutionary process. -
Book: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity
The "hidden agenda," hardly revealed here for the first time, is a synthesis of the physical, the mental, and the moral; for example, relating rationality to emotions, medicine to ethics; and a similar synthesis of the sociopolitical functions best served by national, subnational, or supranational institutions, plus the private organizations that are free to criticize public policies. https://mtprof.msun.edu/Spr1992/Nostrev.html -
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) selected Toulmin for the Jefferson Lecture
The U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. His lecture, a Dissenter's Story" discussed the roots of modernity in rationalism and humanism, the "contrast of reasonable and rational:, and warned of the "abstractions that may still temp us back into the dogmatism,chauvinism and sectarianism of our needs have outgrown". https://neh.dspacedirect.org/bitstream/handle/11215/3780/LIB39_003-public.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y -
Book: Return to Reason
Stephen Toulmin argues that the potential for reason to improve our lives has been hampered by a serious imbalance in our pursuit of knowledge. The centuries-old dominance of rationality has diminished the value of reasonableness. Toulmin issues a powerful statement to redress the balance between rationality and reasonableness. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674012356 -
Stephen Toulmin dies at the age of 87
Spanning nearly six decades, Toulmin’s research focused on moral reasoning analyses. A foremost authority on ethics, international relations, history and philosophy of the physical and social sciences, and the history of ideas, his research has widely influenced many fields, particularly clinical medical ethics, rhetoric, communication and computer science. https://news.usc.edu/30124/In-Memoriam-Stephen-E-Toulmin-87/
