Eight Theses Reflecting on Stephen Toulmin

The Cult of Empiricism in Psychology, and Beyond

The Toulmin Model Today: Introduction to the Special Issue on Contemporary Work using Stephen Edelston Toulmin’s Layout of Arguments

In 1958, Stephen Edelston Toulmin’s The Uses of Argument saw the light of day. This book has never been out of print; an updated second edition appeared in 2003. It has influenced, and continues to influence, researchers in speech communication and philosophy, and also in artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology and application domains such as law and medicine. In The Uses of Argument Toul...

The Uses of Argument, Updated Edition

‘A central theme throughout the impressive series of philosophical books and articles Stephen Toulmin has published since 1948 is the way in which assertions and opinions concerning all sorts of topics, brought up in everyday life or in academic research, can be rationally justified. Is there one universal system of norms, by which all sorts of arguments in all sorts of fields must be judged, o...

The Uses of Argument in Mathematics

Stephen Toulmin once observed that ‘it has never been customary for philosophers to pay much attention to the rhetoric of mathematical debate’ (Toulmin & al., 1979, p. 89). Might the application of Toulmin’s layout of arguments to mathematics remedy this oversight? Toulmin’s critics fault the layout as requiring so much abstraction as to permit incompatible reconstructions. Mathematical proofs ...

Toulmin’s Jurisprudential Model, Inductive Probabilty, and Computation

1. The Toulmin Model and Assessing Connection Adequ acy Stephen Toulmin has established a connection between legal reasoning and a general theory of argument through his jurisprudential model of "the layout of arguments." In introducing this model in The Uses of Argument, he seeks to reject the Aristotelian (mathematical/geometrical/syllogistic) model of argument structure, which analyses argum...