Provided by the author(s) and NUI Galway in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite the published version when available. Title Between Logic and Rhetoric Author(s) Canavan, Thomas, F. Publication Date 2012-02 Item record http://hdl.handle.net/10379/2729 Downloaded 2021-09-29T22:02:07Z Some rights reserved. For more information, please see the item record link above. Between Logic and Rhetoric: Toulmin’s Theory of Argumentation Candidate: Thomas F. Canavan Supervisors: Professor M. Woerner, Professor P. Crowther School of Humanities, Philosophy, N.U.I.G. Submitted: Feb. 2012 For Connie. Without her encouragement and assistance this work could not have been done. Acknowledgements I am grateful to many people for their assistance in the production of this study. Professor Markus Woerner, who oversaw the work from the beginning, was inspirational by the depth of his profound scholarship, challenging by the standards he set and generous in his attention to detail during the course of the supervision. I am grateful also to Professor Paul Crowther, Dr. Nick Tosh and other members of the Dept. of Philosophy at N.U.I.G. for their willing support and commitment. I wish to thank the members of staff at the library at N.U.I.G., especially those in the inter-library lending section, for their painstaking assistance and unfailing courtesy. From my family I received consistent encouragement and support with Frank providing technical facilitation.I can best show my appreciation by sharing with them anything I might have learned and a continuing enthusiasm for understanding. Abstract In The Uses of Argument (1958), Stephen E. Toulmin produced a model, analogous to procedures in jurisprudence, for the layout of arguments. He was seeking to provide a method of accommodating arguments in a wide range of situations, which he believed could not be encompassed by formal deductive logic. This study, Between Logic and Rhetoric: Toulmin‘s Theory of Argumentation, claims that, in spite of the initial hostile reaction from logicians, the model gained acceptance, especially in North America, as a valuable contribution to informal logic and argumentation theory. The study claims, further, that the Toulmin model remains centrally important to that discipline, not just as an historical landmark, but as a useful template for the construction, analysis and evaluation of arguments concerning matters of fact in areas such as ethics, aesthetics, communication studies, cognitive science and artificial intelligence, as well as those leading to decisions in matters of policy. The study proceeds by showing the rationale for Toulmin’s rejection of the then current hegemony of formal deductive logic and providing a justification for the six-element argument structure he introduces. It responds to the criticisms of those who rejected it, and identifies the aspects which commended the model to those who adopted it. The origins of the Toulmin model are related to the tradition of rhetoric extending from Aristotle, and Toulmin’s debts to his predecessors and contemporaries are acknowledged. In response to Toulmin’s suggestion that the layout of argument in The Uses of Argument (1958) might be capable of further development, the study examines some possible modifications which could render the model more efficacious without doing violence to the original inspiration. In addition, it deals with the suggestion that the Toulmin model is limited to matters of fact, by illustrating its use in decision-making, and it shows that the system can accommodate a wide range of argument modes, e.g. dialectical or persuasive. The study maintains that the versatility of the Toulmin model is related to the fact that the organisation of the six elements of a fully-fledged argument represent an organic development and reflect the natural progress of human verbal interaction in the justification of a claim, or, subsequently, from adequate and relevant support to a conclusion with the appropriate modal qualification. Finally, since democratic societies depend on genuine debate on contingent affairs, or “things which may be otherwise” (Aristotle), which are not amenable to demonstration by formal proofs, the Toulmin model of argumentation is particularly suited for democratic education in communicative action. Table of Contents Introduction 1 Ch.1. Ethics and Science: The Place of Reason 19 The Uses of Argument and the Contemporary Debate 19 Reason in Ethics: Contemporary Views 21 Conclusions “Worthy of Acceptance” 28 The Function of Ethics 29 Ethical Traditions 33 Reasoning in Science: Physics and Natural History 35 Rectilinear Propagation of Light and Snell’s Law 37 Inference in accordance with principles 41 Summary 43 Notes 45 Ch.2. The Toulmin Model 49 Putting Logical Theory in its Place 49 Fields of Argument and Modal Qualifiers 50 Probability 51 Analytic and Substantial Arguments 53 The Toulmin Model of Argumentation 59 Toulmin and Deduction 64 Logic and Epistemology 66 Summary 66 Notes 69 Ch.3. Toulmin and Aristotelian Ways of Reflecting on Reasoning: Topoi, Rhetorical Deduction and Induction 71 Aristotle’s Organon 74 Argumentation based on Topoi 75 Toulmin and Topics 83 Toulmin, Enthymeme and Paradigm 84 Topics: Toulmin and Perelman 91 Inference: The Primacy of Induction 93 Summary 100 Notes 102 Ch.4. Logicians’ Objections and Rhetoricians’ Defences 105 Logical Form and Analyticity: H.N. Castaneda 106 Misunderstanding the Purpose of Arguments: J.L. Cowan 115 Wrong Method of bringing Logic into Practice: P. Manicas 120 Pushing Contextualisation too far: R. Abelson 123 Rhetorical Utility: Brockriede, Ehninger and Trent 127 Summary 132 Notes 134 Ch.5. Toulmin and the Pragmatics of Informal Logic 137 Tension between Formal and Informal Logic 138 Definition and Precision of Language 140 Argument Today: Logical, Dialectical, Rhetorical 145 Argument Evaluation and the Rise of Acceptability 149 Toulmin and Fallacious Argumentation 156 Argumentation Schemes and Informal Logic 161 Summary 166 Notes 168 Ch.6. Toulmin and the Future of Informal Logic 172 The Uses of Argument: Democratic Society 172 Conference (2005): “Arguing on the Toulmin Model” 175 Possible Developments of the Toulmin Model 178 The Toulmin Model in Action: Argument Construction, Analysis and Evaluation 192 Argument Construction: Decision Making 194 Arguments Derived from or Leading to Speech Acts other than Constatives 196 Evaluation of Arguments 200 Summary 203 Notes 204 Conclusion 207 Bibliography 220 Introduction Introduction Stephen Toulmin identifies modernity with the events taking place in Europe during the period from c.1650 to the middle of the twentieth century. In retrospect, this period has been characterised by a confidence in the power of both science and philosophy to yield increasing degrees of certainty about all reality: in the fullness of time the world would succumb to rational explanation and control. The putative methods of science, i.e. hypothesis, experiment and verification/falsification, would be applied to all aspects of life and, for the logical positivist, those aspects of experience which did not fit within the pattern would be consigned to the realm of “non-sense”. Toulmin cites John Dewey’s Quest for Certainty (1929) as a wake-up call from this dream, and much of Toulmin’s own work is predicated on the conviction that the early confidence in what might at a later time be referred to as a “brave new world” was illusory. During the twentieth century, the metaphorical use of “seismic” to describe major social and/or political upheavals, gained currency as arrangements that seemed stable collapsed, and new arrangements, more or less stable, came into being. The virtual end of colonialism and the shifting of power blocs have meant that a global view must encompass not merely a reasonably homogenous, developed, liberal and democratic Western society, but also new alliances and power centres demanding and insisting on fair shares and opportunities for development in accordance with their own vision. In spite of the military conflicts, of which there has been no cessation during the course of the twentieth century, there have been continuous parallel efforts to achieve co-existence, but with an increasing recognition that contingency, rather than certainty, is the dominant feature of the political, as well as the natural, landscape. In the twenty-first century, an even more widespread appreciation of “seismic” change has been afforded by increased understanding of the movement of tectonic plates and the consequent movement of earth, water and potentially lethal radiation, as well as the degradation caused by global warming. Such matters, once the exclusive domain of experts and, sometimes, dogmatists, are now subjects of 1 Introduction common conversations among concerned citizens. Instability, rather than stability, is more and more becoming accepted as the default human condition. The earlier image of a society reflecting an orderly cosmos is no longer tenable; the inherent proneness of the cosmos itself to change is an everyday familiarity. The enhanced means of communication which have informed worldwide audiences of these trends have also served to render these same audiences more sceptical in their attitudes towards the previously dominant groups: governments, multinational corporations, religious dogmatists, and even accredited experts in the fields of finance or science, are subject to demands for explanation and justification, rather than mere pronouncement. In this context, it