Return to Reason [Hardcover]

Stephen Toulmin (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0674004957 | ISBN-13: 978-0674004955 | Publication Date: May 29, 2001

The turmoil and brutality of the twentieth century have made it increasingly difficult to maintain faith in the ability of reason to fashion a stable and peaceful world. After the ravages of global conflict and a Cold War that divided the world's loyalties, how are we to master our doubts and face the twenty-first century with hope?

In 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, a mathematical mode of reasoning modeled on theory and universal certainties, has diminished the value of reasonableness, a system of humane judgments based on personal experience and practice. To this day, academic disciplines such as economics and professions such as law and medicine often value expert knowledge and abstract models above the testimony of diverse cultures and the practical experience of individuals.

Now, at the beginning of a new century, Toulmin sums up a lifetime of distinguished work and issues a powerful call to redress the balance between rationality and reasonableness. His vision does not reject the valuable fruits of science and technology, but requires awareness of the human consequences of our discoveries. Toulmin argues for the need to confront the challenge of an uncertain and unpredictable world, not with inflexible ideologies and abstract theories, but by returning to a more humane and compassionate form of reason, one that accepts the diversity and complexity that is human nature as an essential beginning for all intellectual inquiry.

(20010816)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Indictments of contemporary culture often blame its demise on an overdependence on rationality. Since at least the early 17th century, mathematical reasoning has reigned as a model of cultural inquiry, even infiltrating literary criticism in the guise of deconstruction. Yet the natural disasters and human atrocities of the late 20th century call into question reason's efficacy as a beacon for cultural well-being. In elegant prose, Toulmin (Cosmopolis), Henry R. Luce Professor at USC, contends that advocates of pure reason have forgotten "the complementary concept of reasonableness," a model of intellectual practice focused on values and experience rather than facts and theories. His rich conceptual history outlines the ways in which early modern science and philosophy separated reasonableness from rationality, and the resulting imbalance in all academic disciplines. Toulmin uses medical ethics to illustrate how an intellectual commitment to a single moral theory inadequately addresses the practical experiences, limits and values of a given patient and physician. Drawing on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, William James, Wittgenstein and William Gass, Toulmin argues for redressing the balance between the Ideal (Reason) and the Actual (Reasonableness) in order to respect "the manual skills and practical experiences" of those who have the "right to be the intellectual equals of any system of theory." Although Toulmin is not as thoroughgoing in his denial of reason as Richard Rorty, who once claimed that reading novels best prepares one to do philosophy, he pleads eloquently for a new pragmatism that recovers the values of shared experience and practice for reflecting on the nature of truth.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Henry Luce Professor at the University of Southern California after a career at Oxford, Cambridge, and Northwestern, the 79-year-old Toulmin champions "reasonableness" against the imperialistic strictures of formal reasoning. He pursues two distinctions between formal and informal arguments and between the hard sciences and other claims to knowledge. "Horses need plants, and plants need sunlight, so horses need sunlight" is a formal argument depending on logical rules, meanings, and facts. If the facts are right, the conclusion is certain. The suggestion that it is more likely that Caesar first invaded Britain to stop cross-channel raiding than that he was pursuing a runaway mistress is an informal argument depending on historical and cultural contexts. All such arguments are inconclusive, but Toulmin argues that "pragmatism and skepticism are the beginning of a wisdom that is better than the dreams of the rationalists." Toulmin further states that Newtonian physics is a bad model for social science for instance, in trying to be universal, economics has sometimes caused local disasters and he believes that, by getting people together to grasp one another's stories, we can achieve reasonableness. But can we? Everyone could tell the bad guys in Westerns, and Trekkies knew Captain Kirk acted for the best, but not everyone thinks Hollywood got everything right. In a world in which moviemakers, publishers, politicians, and religious leaders influence the stories we get to think about, a little demonstrable proof would be handy. Leslie Armour, Univ. of Ottawa, Ont.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (May 29, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674004957
• ISBN-13: 978-0674004955
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,641,446 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Don't agree with tiglath_iii's review, December 10, 2003

By 

skeptical of both sides (Ganymede) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Return to Reason (Paperback)

My experience in reading this book has been opposite of what tiglath_iii describes. The point of this book is almost too clear, given the author's repeated efforts to summarize it clearly (i.e. "there is too much emphasis on reason and not enough consideration of practical and contextual factors in understanding, a situation that has developed in philosophy only since the seventeenth century and has become cemented in our thinking only in the twentieth"). To say "His name dropping is incessant and intrusive" is unfair: Every source discussed is well-introduced, and he seems to deliberately avoid making his argument too academic or too technical. I will grant that the idea could be expressed more concisely, but it seems to me that the point of the book is to show that concise, streamlined argumentation is very often artificially abstracted, and so its conclusions are very often "useful" in a limited sense. It seems to "practice what it preaches," in that sense. One can hardly fault Toulmin for writing in a sometimes meandering, anecdotal style when his subject is the damaging effects of overemphasizing logical argumentation.
I have been looking for writers (besides Rorty) who address the growing resistance of philosophers to the suggestions of the those in the humanities (in Toulmin's terms, defending "logic" against the "casuistry of rhetoric"), and Toulmin's book was just what I was looking for. I had trouble putting this book down once I started it, and wanted to read more when I was done.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Rethink your idea of argument, May 10, 2011

By 

windladybug - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Return to Reason (Paperback)

I recently taught this book, and the first time I read it, I thought: why did I assign such a horribly argued book? The second time through it, as I worked on it with my students, it slowly dawned on me exactly what Toulmin is doing--he is modeling the type of conception of rationality for which he is arguing. His argument is that reason was led astray by the Enlightenment, and we need to return it to a broader, premodern conception. To do this, he cannot rely on modernist approaches to argument or rationality. Before I realized he was deliberately attempting to undermine standard ways of making arguments, the book was frustrating and confusing. After I understood he was practicing what he was preaching about returning to premodern notions of reasonableness, I found the book interesting and insightful. His work is, in a different way, arguing many of the same points as MacIntyre concerning the nature of rationality. Ironically, I found Toulmin's take on Wittgenstein entirely wrong-headed (Toulmin was a student of Wittgenstein's), but his overall argument is persuasive if you let go of preconceived notions about how philosophical arguments are supposed to proceed. That's the secret to figuring out what he is up to.

4.0 out of 5 stars PROVIDES LITTLE POSITIVE GUIDANCE, September 23, 2011

By 

Yehezkel Dror (Jerusalem Israel) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Return to Reason (Paperback)

Living with the Genie: Essays On Technology And The Quest For Human Mastery

This is an important book, but also a disappointing one. The critique of "rationality" in its naďve forms, such as geometric logic and rational choice theory, as applied to social issues, and the endorsement of the importance of tacit (and I would add "local") knowledge are well taken. But the alternative of relying on "reason" is not elaborated in ways which are useful for coping with the pressing issues of humanity (and of the social sciences). "Common sense" is not discussed and is in any case no good for coping with "uncommon problems," the work of the Santa Fe Institute on Complexity is several times mentioned favorably without critical examination, chaos theory is complimented despite its limited usefulness beyond some illuminating metaphors, a case approach to moral issues is recommended though it does not work for novel and unique situations in the absence of theoretic-philosophic guidelines, and so on.

Charles Sanders Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, recognized the limits of induction and deduction, but proposed "abduction" as a form of "educated guess" as a basis for "pragmatic" theories that can serve as grounding for action. Modular and temporal logic also provide approaches which are not "rational" in the strict sense, but are much more than "reason" in the vague meanings discussed in the book. No such positive contributions to urgently needed new ways of "pondering" are provided by this book.

Humanity, for the first time in its history, has the ability, as supplied by science and technology, to eliminate itself (deliberately or unintentionally), to create a new post-human species, or to thrive pluralistically. But, to avoid self-destruction and decide on the other options, unprecedented global policies are required, involving for instance intrusive regulation of the production and uses of knowledge and technologies - approximating some features of a, hopefully benevolent, Global Leviathan directed by a small number of superpowers.

The author is right: Geometric thinking, including modern derivatives such as theory of games, will not help in pondering such options. But neither will "reason" in its classical meanings, such as "practical knowledge, past-based tacit knowledge and case-pragmatism. Instead, essential is a novel type of "melody of the mind" based inter alia on interaction between conjectural theories, responsible revaluation of values, much creativity, and explicit and tacit a feel for historic processes.

The author is to be complimented in posing the need to think in terms of "futuribles," that is alternative perhaps possible futures. He helps to clear away some of the barriers to doing so. But he provides no guidance how to do the required thinking and on what to base it.

Professor Yehezkel Dror
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
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