[lit-ideas] Re: Toulmin: The Outsider
- From: "Walter C. Okshevsky" <wokshevs@xxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 10 Dec 2009 16:15:39 -0330
Thank you very much for sharing, JL. I enjoyed reading this interview immensely.
(And I believe Toulmin enjoyed his little game with his interviewer equally as
much.)
Does anybody know why Strawson found *UOI* so objectionable?
Walter O
MUN
Quoting Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx:
>
>
> Toulmin: An Outsider in Oxford. My last post today.
> Excerpts from an online interview: interesting what he says about Strawson
> dismissing "Uses of Inference" in Listener, "and that was the end of the
> reception of my ideas in England".
> Toulmin -- the Oxford years
> Excerpts from a Toulmin interview found online:
> Q. Do you think of yourself as a writer?
> A. Yes, I suppose I think of myself as a writer. ... I'm not sure that
> just being a writer is an honorable way of spending a whole life, but that's
>
> another matter.
> Q. Would you describe your writing process?
> A. I wrote out my first ethics book with pen and ink.
> Q. So, you give a great deal of thought to the subject before actually
> dictating a text.
> A. It's not that I think about it; it's much more like architecture.
> Q. Quite a few compositionists will be pleased with your emphasis on the
> revising and editing processes.
> A. It's especially important in philosophy, where obscurity is regarded as
> a mark of profundity.
> Q. Who would you say has had the most influence on you intellectually?
> A. Wittgenstein was a major influence partly because, like him, I began in
> physics; my first degree was in math and physics.
> Q. That was your first book.
> A. Well, yes. I don't think that at that stage I understood at all clearly
> what Wittgenstein's attitude toward ethics was. ... However, that meant
> that at a certain stage it was quite apparent to me that you couldn't really
>
> get the account of the operations of the human reason that I was interested
>
> in without looking at how concepts change; that was how I got onto the
> human understanding project, but this was after having again read, and been
>
> encouraged by reading, Collingwood. Collingwood is a strong influence at a
> certain stage. Actually (and perhaps I'll write an essay about this
> sometime),
> for those who are interested, the entirety of my work could in fact, from
> a certain point of view, be regarded as sketches toward a "novissimum
> organum"; that is, all my books are in different ways concerned with
> rationality, reasonableness, the operations of the human reason, and so on.
>
> Q. The Uses of Argument has received an enormous amount of attention. Are
> you surprised by the overwhelming critical reception of that book and of
> the so-called "Toulmin method" of argumentation?
> A. It was not initially overwhelming, particularly in England. I published
> it in England, and P. F. (later Sir Peter, and collaborator with Grice --
> JLS) Strawson wrote a dismissive review in The Listener, the BBC's
> intellectual weekly; that was the end of the matter so far as my colleagues
> in
> England were concerned.
> Q. Many compositionists use your method as a kind of heuristic for helping
> students develop argumentative essays. Do you approve of this pedagogical
> application of your work?
> A. I'd approve of anything people find fruitful, so long as they don't use
> my ideas dogmatically.
> Q. Some scholars in composition and others in speech use your method as a
> tool of discourse analysis, as a critical tool for examining persuasive
> essays and speeches. Are you also pleased with this application of your
> work?
> A. If you give people a crutch, they can walk into a marsh, or they can
> walk down the center of the road.
> Q. Many scholars in numerous disciplines are preoccupied with the nature of
> persuasion. ... What would you say is at the heart of persuasion? What
> above everything makes a text persuasive?
> A. When Mr. Churchill gave speeches in the House of Commons in the early
> 1940s, they were, as I recall, wonderfully persuasive, but in a different
> kind of way from the texts in molecular biology.
> Q. So there's nothing inherent in a speech or a text that ensures
> persuasion; it's always contingent upon a specific context or situation.
> A. All language functions in situations. I'm still enough of a
> Wittgensteinian to believe that there has to be a Lebensform [life-form] in
> order for
> there to be a Sprachspiel [language game].
> Q. It's been almost four decades since you published The Uses of Argument.
> Have you thought of any ways to refine your model, or would you like to
> alter or retract any part of it?
> A. Oh, sure. If I were writing it again today, especially knowing what kind
> of audience would actually want to make use of it, I would say a great
> deal more in particular about the variety of different things that go by the
>
> name of "backing." It's too much of a kind of carpetbag concept in the book.
>
>
> Q. Many scholars in communication talk about the "Toulmin revolution" in
> argumentation, characterizing your work as descriptive (as opposed to older
>
> prescriptive models) and as in the forefront of the "process view of human
> communication." However, others, such as Charles Willard, attack your
> descriptive diagrams for creating "conceptional confusion" and for unjustly
>
> simplifying the phenomena they seek to describe. What is your response to
> criticism that your descriptive diagrams are reductive and fail to account
> for
> the true complexity of persuasive communication?
> A. To the extent that the Toulmin model has developed a life of its own,
> he's welcome to tear it apart. It doesn't affect my ego.
> Q. It's been said that you based your model of argumentation on the
> workings of jurisprudence in order to move away from the traditional model
> of
> logic based on mathematics and a form of reasoning that seemed too abstract
> to
> be relevant to real-world situations. Similarly, the "critical thinking"
> movement that swept the nation in the 1970s and 80s was an attempt to
> situate
> logical reasoning in realistic scenarios, to contextualize logic and
> argument. What is your opinion of the critical thinking movement? Do you see
>
> your work on argumentation as a part of that movement?
> A. There's an assumption in the first part that's false. For the record, I
> didn't base The Uses of Argument on a jurisprudential model.
> Q. That's interesting, because numerous commentators have made quite a
> point about your basing your model on jurisprudence.
> A. I know; people just assume things without bothering to inquire. You're
> the first to raise this with me, and, therefore, I take the opportunity to
> correct this widespread misapprehension.
> Q. So, do you see your work in trying to situate logic this way as related
> to the critical thinking movement?
> A. I was never part of the critical thinking movement. I only have a kind
> of newspaper reader's gossipy, acquaintance with the movement and therefore
>
> don't know much about it.
> Q. Your work on argumentation is often cited along with Chaim Perelman's
> (his coauthor, Olbrechts-Tyteca, seems to get lost in the shuffle) as the
> two
> works that have changed the face of argumentation. What is your assessment
> of Perelman's "new rhetoric"?
> A. It's difficult to be a pragmatist in a country whose philosophical life
> is dominated by Leuven, one of the most conservative Catholic philosophy
> schools in Europe. Was Perelman Jewish? I suppose so.
> Q. You've said, "Since the mid-1960s, rhetoric has begun to regain its
> respectability as a topic of literary and linguistic analysis, and it now
> shares with narrative an attention for which they both waited a long time."
> What
> role do you see rhetoric playing in a postmodern age?
> A. I think theoretical philosophy as it has existed since the seventeenth
> century has generally attempted to confine the discussion of argumentation
> and the validity of arguments to the zone occupied by the Prior and
> Posterior Analytics of Aristotle.
> Q. Siegfried Schmidt has argued in New Literary History that "if literary
> science is to . . . liberate itself from the (self-adopted) ghetto of the
> humanities, it must evolve into a consciously and critically argumentative
> science." He then proceeds to outline such a "science" based almost entirely
>
> on your method of argumentation. What is your opinion, first, of this kind
> of use of your work and, second, of attempts in general to create a
> science of literary criticism?
> A. I would regard it as a catastrophe.
> Q. I assume he's from Germany, since he was at the University of Bielefeld
> when his article was translated from the German by Peter Heath.
> A. In that case, we're deceived by the translator because I'll bet he used
> the word Wissenschaft. The word Wissenschaft does not mean the same as the
> word science; it means "discipline."
> Q. What, then, do you see as the role of literary theory, especially if it
> is not going to be looking for universals?
> A. Now you approach a very delicate area for me. I find the role of theory
> in literary studies exceedingly limited.
> Q. For the same reasons that we talk about theory being limited in a
> general sense, or is there a specific reason?
> A. I think it's worth specifying the reasons. The first step you take in
> developing a theory is to abstract: you find some examples that seem to
> exemplify with particular clarity some patterns that you would like to use as
>
> general patterns about which to develop a method of theoretical analysis, and
>
> you choose initially to ignore both all other situations which don't
> exemplify the patterns so clearly and also all other features even in those
>
> situations which are not directly relevant to the pattern from which you are
>
> abstracting.
> Q. Do you have a literary critic in mind who would provide the kind of
> illumination you're talking about while avoiding limiting abstraction?
> A. Saul Bellow, when he writes criticism, is quite good.
> Q. What about the use of the French deconstructionists in literary
> criticism? Do you have any opinion about that?
> A. Honestly, about ten years ago I had to decide whether to make an
> investment: the investment of time needed in order to penetrate their
> terminology.
> Q. You take Thomas Kuhn to task for his theory of how knowledge in science
> is created, saying that "the contrast between normal and revolutionary
> change has acquired something of the same spurious absoluteness as the
> medieval
> contrast between rest and motion." Do you disagree generally with the
> thesis that knowledge is a social construct?
> A. I never know what that phrase means.
> Q. Yes, but I think those people who consider themselves "social
> constructionists" are beginning with both Kuhn and Rorty and are saying that
>
> knowledge, and therefore rality, is only a social construct; it's not
> external to
> human discourse.
> A. This is quite different. ... This is a point that Karl Popper grinds on
> and on about. This is what he has in mind when he talks about the "third
> world," which I think is an unhappy way of putting it. To say knowledge is a
>
> social construct and not external is open to precisely the same
> difficulties as Kant's references to the Ding an sich [the thing in itself].
> Kant
> keeps saying, "You can't say anything at all about the Ding an sich." But
> what's he just done? You see, that's the problem. If Kant had really
> understood
> about the Ding an sich with, so to say, full Wittgensteinian seriousness,
> he would have avoided saying that; he would have found some way of
> gesturing in the direction of that which we can't say anything about. I think
> it
> need do no harm to say that all theories are social constructs if all you
> mean
> is that concepts are human products and that you have no theory without
> concepts.
> Q. In a recent book about feminist epistemology and the construction of
> knowledge, philosopher Lorraine Code argues that the sex of the knower is
> "epistemologically significant" and that it is time to move beyond mainstream
>
> epistemology, which, she argues, is Cartesian and is modeled after physics.
> What are your thoughts about this work?
> A. I think the defects of the Cartesian tradition come up most strikingly
> in the shortcomings of psychology.
> Q. You say that "sexual emotion appeared the gravest threat to the
> hierarchical Nation-State" and that traditionalists could preserve the class
> basis
> of society only by "expelling sex from the realm of respectability." One
> of the final blows to modernism and its defense of nation-states was the new
>
> attitude toward sex, emotions, gender discrimination, and the role of
> women. Do you credit this monumental change of attitude at least in part to
> the
> women's movement?
> A. Sure, the women's movement is a very important expression of it, though
> I hate to take on single causes in a situation of this kind.
> Q. In what way?
> A. On every level.
> Q. So beyond the personal impact on your life, you do see the women's
> movement as being successful in general then.
> A. I know there is a fair number of women, especially in the intellectual
> world, who feel that not much has been gained.
> Q. American MTV is not much better.
> A. Yes, but there's a kind of tongue-in-cheek quality about it.
> Q. You've expressed "grave objections" to the strong nativist position of
> Chomsky and others that "the human language capacity is specific and
> unitary," and you seem to support instead a weaker version of the nativist
> thesis.
> Would you clarify your thoughts about innate language capacity, especially
> given the fact that nativism in general seems to be in such disrepute?
> A. Is it? I didn't know that. Things change so quickly. I remember when
> Chomsky gave his John Locke Lectures in Oxford. I went to all of them.
> Q. So the notion of how you handle concepts is different.
> A. To the extent that handling concepts is what goes on in the public
> domain, it could very well be the same; but to the extent that some of these
>
> operations become internalized, yes, they'd be different in different
> cultures.
> Q. A large portion of Cosmopolis concerns deestablishing received views
> about when the modern age began. Why is this so important?
> A. It's important because the most striking change that took place in the
> culture of Europe and that deserves to be marked as the transition from one
> age to another is that which followed the general availability of printed
> books, as a result of which you get a lay culture alongside and eventually
> displacing the ecclesiastical culture. If there's any single feature
> characteristic of what we call the Middle Ages, it is the dominance of the
> ecclesiastical culture and the associated creation of a transnational
> community of
> scholars, chancellors and clerics of different kinds whose task was both
> to define and transmit the received culture; they were the bearers of
> culture, and they decided what belonged in it. Of course, there were
> wandering
> scholars and other eccentric folk whose goings on we're beginning to
> appreciate better, thanks to such people as Helen Waddell and Carlo
> Ginzburg; but
> still, the received culture as it exists almost down to 1500 is the culture
>
> as defined and transmitted within this community of scholars who were also
> clerics. Of course, there was Chaucer, and of course there were exceptions
> (especially in Italy, where the Renaissance began early), but still I see
> this as the vital transition. Things that happened in the seventeenth
> century, with the emergence of the exact sciences and Cartesianism and all
> the
> rest, would have been impossible if not for events occurring at the very end
>
> of the fifteenth century but primarily in the sixteenth century. After all,
>
> it's not for nothing that Erasmus, Rabelais, Cervantes, Montaigne, and
> Shakespeare all lived in a situation in which there was a minimal amount of
>
> exact sciences to pay any attention to. Their conception of what there was
> to
> write and talk about was formed in this situation. This is why we call
> them humanists; their preoccupations were those of the humanities, and they
>
> were the people who recovered and made more widely available the bits of
> classical antiquity that had never been properly attended to in the High
> Middle
> Ages: Plutarch, Sophocles, Ovid, and the rest.
>
> Q. You say in Cosmopolis, "The opening gambit of modern philosophy
> becomes, not the decontextualized rationalism of Descartes Discourse and
> Meditations, but Montaigne's restatement of classical skepticism in the
> Apology. .
> . . He believed that there is no general truth about which certainty is
> possible, and concluded that we can claim certainty about nothing." Yet,
> these
> values are often cited as "postmodern." In fact, some composition scholars
> point directly to Montaigne and his "open-ended inquiry" and his
> "resistance to closure" as desirable facets of a postmodern pedagogy. What
> are your
> thoughts about this seeming contradiction?
> A. At the meeting with the speech communication people, one comment seemed
> to me to be both extremely intelligent and amusing. Somebody was wondering
> what to call the attitude I'd been presenting in my lecture for them and
> came up with this wonderful phrase: "neo-premodern."
> Q. So you don't find a problem with people using Montaigne as a precursor
> to postmodern ideas?
> A. I think Montaigne is much better than nearly everybody I've read who's
> consciously postmodernist, so I think the idea of their reading Montaigne
> and learning from him is desirable.
> Q. You argue in Human Understanding that if we are ever going to be able
> to increase our understanding of human understanding we must halt the
> increasing tendency to compartmentalize academic areas and disciplines, "For
> the
> very boundaries between academic disciplines are themselves a consequence of
>
> the current divisions of intellectual authority, and the justice of those
> divisions is itself one of the chief questions to be faced afresh." And in
>
> Cosmopolis you say, "The intellectual tasks for a science in which all the
> branches are accepted as equally serious call for more subdisciplinary,
> transdisciplinary, and multidisciplinary reasoning." How can we stop the
> trend
> toward increasing compartmentalization and instead encourage the kind of
> intellectual border crossing that you espouse?
> A. On a certain level, I'm less pessimistic than perhaps I was earlier.
> Q. You have written, "When Wittgenstein and Rorty argue that philosophy is
> at the end of the road, they are overdramatizing the situation. The present
>
> state of the subject marks the return from a theory-centered conception,
> dominated by a concern for stability and rigor, to a renewed acceptance of
>
> practice, which requires us to adapt action to the special demands of
> particular occasions. . . . The task is not to build new, more comprehensive
>
> systems of theory with universal and timelessrelevance, but to limit the
> scope
> of even the best-framed theories and fight the intellectual reductionism
> that became entrenched during the ascendancy of rationalism." This is
> reminiscent of Geertz's "local knowledge" and Fish's campaign "against
> theory." Do
> you believe there will be any role for theory in the postmodern age other
> than the limited scope you refer to?
> A. I don't know what people mean by "theory" in this situation.
> Q. It's persuasive, argumentative.
> A. Yes, it's intended to be persuasive, argumentative.
> Q. You write that the thesis of Human Understanding is that "in science
> and philosophy alike, an exclusive preoccupation with logical systematicity
>
> has been destructive of both historical understanding and rational
> criticism." You go on to say that people "demonstrate their rationality, not
> by
> ordering their concepts and beliefs in tidy formal structures, but by their
>
> preparedness to respond to novel situations with open minds." Then, in
> Cosmopolis, you aregue that in the postmodern age we don't need to replace
> "rationality" with "absurdity," as you say Lyotard and the
> deconstructionists
> believe; rather, we need to reconceptualize rationality as non-systemic. How
>
> would you characterize this new postmodern rationality? How would it work?
> A. First, within this new situation, we should be much less tempted to
> contrast "rationality" with "reasonableness."
> Q. So a new kind of rationality would be contextualized within specific
> areas.
> A. Yes. The trouble is that the word rationality is like the word
> rhetoric.
> Q. It's akin to the big and little t's of theory; now we have a big and
> little r.
> A. Yes, that's actually a very interesting thing to say because the
> critical theory literature oscillates between using the word rational with,
> as it
> were, a small r and then referring to "rationality" in a way that I think
> immediately springs a capital R in Rorty's sense.
> Q. You've put forth numerous controversial propositions in several
> disciplinary areas, including logic, philosophy of science, and rhetoric.
> Such
> work has led to a considerable aount of criticism. Are there any criticisms
> or
> misunderstandings of your work that you would like to address at this time?
> A. I have shamelessly failed to pay attention to criticism of my work.
>
>
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