26 Facts About Stephen Toulmin

Stephen Edelston Toulmin was a British philosopher, author, and educator.

Stephen Toulmin's works were later found useful in the field of rhetoric for analyzing rhetorical arguments.

Stephen Toulmin was born in London, UK, on 25 March 1922 to Geoffrey Edelson Toulmin and Doris Holman Toulmin.

Stephen Toulmin earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from King's College, Cambridge, in 1943, where he was a Cambridge Apostle.

In 1960, Stephen Toulmin returned to London to hold the position of director of the Unit for History of Ideas of the Nuffield Foundation.

In 1965, Stephen Toulmin returned to the United States, where he held positions at various universities.

One of his most recent works, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, written while Stephen Toulmin held the position of the Avalon Foundation Professor of the Humanities at Northwestern University, specifically criticizes the practical use and the thinning morality underlying modern science.

Stephen Toulmin held distinguished professorships at a number of different universities, including Columbia, Dartmouth College, Michigan State, Northwestern, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the University of Southern California School of International Relations.

On 2 March 2006 Stephen Toulmin received the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art.

On 4 December 2009 Stephen Toulmin died of a heart failure at the age of 87 in Los Angeles, California.

The flaw of absolutism, Stephen Toulmin believes, lies in its unawareness of the field-dependent aspect of argument; absolutism assumes that all aspects of argument are field invariant.

In Human Understanding, Stephen Toulmin suggests that anthropologists have been tempted to side with relativists because they have noticed the influence of cultural variations on rational arguments.

In Cosmopolis Stephen Toulmin seeks the origins of the modern emphasis on universality, and criticizes both modern science and philosophers for having ignored practical issues in preference for abstract and theoretical issues.

Similarly, Stephen Toulmin sensed a thinning of morality in the field of sciences, which has diverted its attention from practical issues concerning ecology to the production of the atomic bomb.

Stephen Toulmin follows up on this critique in Return to Reason, where he seeks to illuminate the ills that, in his view, universalism has caused in the social sphere, discussing, among other things, the discrepancy between mainstream ethical theory and real-life ethical quandaries.

Stephen Toulmin believed that for a good argument to succeed, it needs to provide good justification for a claim.

When Stephen Toulmin first proposed it, this layout of argumentation was based on legal arguments and intended to be used to analyze the rationality of arguments typically found in the courtroom.

Stephen Toulmin did not realize that this layout could be applicable to the field of rhetoric and communication until his works were introduced to rhetoricians by Wayne Brockriede and Douglas Ehninger.

Only after Stephen Toulmin published Introduction to Reasoning were the rhetorical applications of this layout mentioned in his works.

One criticism of the Stephen Toulmin model is that it does not fully consider the use of questions in argumentation.

The Stephen Toulmin model assumes that an argument starts with a fact or claim and ends with a conclusion, but ignores an argument's underlying questions.

In 1972, Stephen Toulmin published Human Understanding, in which he asserts that conceptual change is an evolutionary process.

Stephen Toulmin criticized the relativist elements in Kuhn's thesis, arguing that mutually exclusive paradigms provide no ground for comparison, and that Kuhn made the relativists' error of overemphasizing the "field variant" while ignoring the "field invariant" or commonality shared by all argumentation or scientific paradigms.

In contrast to Kuhn's revolutionary model, Stephen Toulmin proposed an evolutionary model of conceptual change comparable to Darwin's model of biological evolution.

Innovation occurs when the professionals of a particular discipline come to view things differently from their predecessors; selection subjects the innovative concepts to a process of debate and inquiry in what Stephen Toulmin considers as a "forum of competitions".

At a meeting of the executive council of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry in Denver, Colorado in April 2011, Stephen Toulmin was selected for inclusion in CSI's Pantheon of Skeptics.