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CCC 61:1 / september 2009

Joseph Bizup

The Uses of Toulmin in Composition Studies

In 1958, Stephen Toulmin published The Uses of Argument, the third chapter of which presents a “layout” or model of argument that has exerted enormous influence on argument theory and on the teaching of argument for half a century. One of the book’s guiding premises is that we can best apprehend the meaning or force of words and propositions by looking at how people actu-ally use them in various contexts (65). Proceeding in this spirit, I want to take the fiftieth anniversary of the book’s publication as an occasion to examine the uses to which Toulmin himself has been put in the scholarly discourse of composition studies. The picture is a mixed one. On the one hand, the Toulmin model and its pedagogical applications are longstanding topics of discussion and inquiry in composition studies, and Toulmin’s theoretical formulations have been invoked by participants in some of the discipline’s major debates.1

On the other hand, composition scholars have historically attended to only a few of Toulmin’s works beyond The Uses of Argument, and citations of even

This article examines the various uses to which Stephen Toulmin has been put in composition studies. It presents data on citations of Toulmin in nine journals, consid-ers appeals to Toulmin in several strains of composition scholarship, and argues that composition scholars ought to attend more carefully to Toulmin’s later works.

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these have waned in recent years. The problem is not that Toulmin’s presence in our field is diminishing; it is that his diminishing presence may lead us to forget the broader intellectual project within which his ideas about argument are situated, to the detriment of our scholarship and our teaching.

To gauge Toulmin’s place in the discipline, I surveyed citations of Toulmin, Chaim Perelman, and Thomas S. Kuhn in nine major journals from the late 1970s through 2007 (see Tables 1–3).2 I chose Perelman and Kuhn as touchstones for comparison because they are similar to Toulmin in a number of ways. Perelman and Kuhn are commonly acknowledged to be the most prominent rhetorician and philosopher of science, respectively, of their generation. Like Perelman, Toulmin is regarded as a major contemporary rhetorician, and like Kuhn, he is regarded as a major philosopher of science. Moreover, all three men are close contemporaries who published their most influential works within a half-decade of one another.3 Perelman receives far more citations in Rhetoric Society Quarterly and Rhetoric Review than either Toulmin or Kuhn, which confirms his preeminence among rhetoric scholars. But if we exclude these two journals from the count, Toulmin’s numbers equal Perelman’s. Kuhn receives more cita-tions than either Toulmin or Perelman in College English, which perhaps marks him as the figure having the most general appeal. Toulmin receives the most citations in Teaching English in the Two-Year College, reflecting his importance to practical writing pedagogy, and also in Written Communication, reflecting his significance for scholars who study writing in professional contexts, but he is not poorly represented in the other journals surveyed. Citations of Toulmin peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s and then taper off. But the same is also true for citations of Perelman and Kuhn, which suggests that this decline may be due as much to the current movement away from high theory in composition studies as it is to a diminishing interest in Toulmin specifically.4

Of more concern to me than the recent drop in citations of Toulmin is the fact that composition scholars have historically attended to only a frac-tion of his corpus (see Table 4). Toulmin authored, co-authored, or edited over twenty books, and he wrote scores of articles and essays, but just a handful of these works receive any notice at all from composition scholars. Toulmin’s most cited work, accounting for about half of the citations he receives, is The Uses of Argument. His second most cited work, accounting for about a quarter of his citations, is Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts, a book Toulmin describes as elaborating the main claims of The Uses of Argument “in a historical frame” (vii). His third most cited work, accounting for about one seventh of his citations, is An Introduction to Reasoning, a text-

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Table 1: Citations of Toulmin by Journal

CE CCC FEN/CS JAC PT RR RSQ TETYC WC Total

1976–80 1 2 - - 1 - 2 0 - 6

1981–85 6 3 - 1 2 2 1 0 2 17

1986–90 4 5 0 1 1 5 2 0 7 25

1991–95 1 0 1 6 1 2 2 0 6 19

1996–2000 5 0 1 2 - 3 0 1 6 18

2001–05 1 1 0 4 - 1 0 3 5 15

2006–07 0 2 0 0 - 1 0 0 1 4

Total 18 13 2 14 5 14 7 4 27 104

Table 2: Citations of Perelman by Journal

CE CCC FEN/CS JAC PT RR RSQ TETYC WC Total

1976–80 2 2 - - 0 - 5 0 - 9

1981–85 5 4 - 3 4 2 2 0 3 23

1986–90 3 5 1 4 6 7 13 0 5 44

1991–95 6 1 0 1 3 9 12 0 2 34

1996–2000 4 2 1 0 - 6 12 0 6 31

2001–05 0 1 1 3 - 7 2 0 3 17

2006–07 0 0 0 0 - 3 2 0 2 7

Total 20 15 3 11 13 34 48 0 21 165

Table 3: Citations of Kuhn by Journal

CE CCC FEN/CS JAC PT RR RSQ TETYC WC Total

1976–80 6 2 - - 3 - 3 0 - 14

1981–85 7 6 - 1 4 3 0 1 1 23

1986–90 5 3 1 3 2 4 6 0 7 31

1991–95 9 6 2 9 4 5 4 0 4 43

1996–2000 7 1 0 4 - 2 2 0 2 18

2001–05 0 1 1 4 - 2 0 0 1 9

2006–07 0 0 1 0 - 3 0 0 0 4

Total 34 19 5 21 13 19 15 1 15 142

Note: The journal abbreviations used above are CE (College English), CCC (College Composition and Communica-tion), FEN/CS (Freshman English News, Composition Studies), JAC (Journal of Advanced Composition, JAC) PT (Pre/Text), RR (Rhetoric Review), RSQ (Rhetoric Society Quarterly), TETYC (Teaching English in the Two-Year College), and WC (Written Communication).

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book based on the Toulmin model that he wrote with Richard Rieke and Allan Janik. In other words, almost 90 percent of the citations Toulmin receives in composition journals are to The Uses of Argument or to two other books related directly to it.5 His writings on ethics and ethical reasoning, his work in the his-tory of science, his forays into cognitive psychology, and his contributions to cultural and critical history receive scant notice.

Over the past thirty years, Toulmin has been an eminently useful figure for composition studies. From the early 1980s through the early 1990s, he is generally positioned as an authority. He is regularly cited in the scholarship on writing in the disciplines and in parallel examinations of composition studies’s emergence as a discipline, and he also appears in the cognitivist/construction-ist debate provoked by Linda Flower and John R. Hayes’s “cognitive process theory.” Even so, composition scholars writing in the 1980s and 1990s only occasionally engage Toulmin in any sustained fashion. More often, they mine his work for concepts and terms they can deploy tactically to further their own arguments, and consequently, they sometimes miss opportunities to forge abid-ing connections between Toulmin’s interests and their own. In the mid-1990s, some scholars begin to treat Toulmin less favorably, questioning his political and ideological commitments and objecting to the purported formalism of the Toulmin model. But these scholars, like their predecessors, tend to read Toulmin selectively, which leads them in some cases to attribute to Toulmin views he does not hold and to criticize him in the name of values he in fact espouses. In an encomium celebrating Toulmin’s being named Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities in 1997, the philosopher Marx W. Wartofsky describes Toulmin as an “odd duck” who has appeared in almost a dozen intellectual guises, includ-

Table 4: Citations of Toulmin’s Works

Uses of Argument

Human Understanding

An Intro. To Reasoning Other

1976–80 3 1 0 1

1981–85 8 5 2 3

1986–90 14 10 3 4

1991–95 9 4 4 5

1996–2000 9 6 4 3

2001–05 12 2 3 1

2006–07 2 1 0 1

Total 57 29 16 18

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ing “natural philosopher,” “ethical theorist,” “theorist of rhetoric,” “virtuoso of cognitive psychology,” and others. When viewed from a certain distance, Wartofsky suggests, Toulmin’s apparent “scatter” of interests “reappears as the many-sided application of a coherent program.” To be sure, some aspects of this program are more directly relevant to composition studies than others. But again, if we lose sight of Toulmin’s larger program, we risk misconstruing and misapplying his specific ideas about argument as well.

Toulmin as a Theorist of DisciplinarityComposition scholars concerned with questions of disciplinarity turn repeat-edly to Toulmin, especially to his 1972 book Human Understanding, the first volume of a projected trilogy elaborating an evolutionary theory of conceptual change in its historical, social, institutional, and cognitive aspects. (He never published the remaining volumes.) Robert J. Connors bases his 1984 analysis of the role of professional journals in shaping composition studies directly on this book’s account of how journals mediate conceptual change in the sciences (“Journals” 352, note 4). Major journals such as College English and College Composition and Communication, Connors observes, have the “public function” of keeping their readers abreast of new research, but their most important function is to serve as “disciplinary filters”—a term he takes from Toulmin—through which their editors can control the “selective perpetuation of new ideas” (351–52). In a similar article published the same year in Rhetoric Review, Janice M. Lauer also draws on Human Understanding. A mature dis-cipline, she maintains, will possess what Toulmin calls an “epistemic court” through which it enforces consensus about the discipline’s shared problems, methods, and tasks (22). In 1997, Maureen Daly Goggin looks again at the role of professional journals in shaping composition studies, and she too relies on Toulmin. Citing the same pages from Human Understanding as Connors, she explains that disciplines develop along what Toulmin identifies as interde-pendent “methodological” and “institutional” axes, the former comprising a discipline’s intellectual goals, problems, and procedures and the latter com-prising its journals, meetings, professional organizations, and credentialing mechanisms (323; emphasis in original).

We find similar appeals to Toulmin in studies of writing in the disciplines and professions. James P. Zappen holds that the model of conceptual change Toulmin elaborates in Human Understanding “can be interpreted as a rhetoric for science and technology” (123). Charles Bazerman, in his foundational study

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Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science, acknowledges Toulmin along with Kuhn, Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos, and Ian Hacking as important to his understanding of scientific disciplines and disciplinary change (4, note 3; 308). Mary G. LaRoche and Sheryl S. Pearson use Toulmin’s concept of a disciplinary “transmit”—that combination of substan-tive and procedural knowledge that is “learned, tested, put to work, criticized, and changed” over time in a given discipline (Toulmin, Human Understanding 158–59, qtd. in LaRoche and Pearson 264; emphasis in original)—to explain change in business organizations, which they frame as Toulminian “rational en-terprises” (262–64). Dorothy A. Winsor likewise uses the concept of a “transmit” in a case study of a single engineer’s writing practices (“Engineering” 67). Susan Peck MacDonald uses Toulmin’s distinction between “compact” and “diffuse” disciplines to facilitate her analysis of writing practices in the humanities and social sciences (Professional 22–23; see also “Problem” 315–16).

These scholars turn repeatedly to Toulmin for at least two reasons. First, like Rorty, Fish, and Kuhn, Toulmin affirms the essentially rhetorical or epis-temic nature of disciplinary discourses.6 Second, his focus on the historical continuity of disciplines makes him more practically useful than these other theorists to scholars studying specific acts of writing in specific disciplinary and institutional contexts. In particular, a number of scholars look to Toulmin as an alternative to Kuhn, whose sweeping notions of disciplinary change they find difficult to deploy in fine-grained analyses.7 Connors rejects attempts to describe composition studies as undergoing a Kuhnian “paradigm shift” or as existing in a Kuhnian “preparadigmatic” state (“Composition” 5) and em-braces Toulmin instead.8 MacDonald observes that Toulmin’s emphasis on the continuity of problems and goals sciences set for themselves enables him “to escape some of the problems Thomas Kuhn has encountered with his dichotomy between normal and revolutionary science” (“Problem” 316). Zappen favors Toulmin over Kuhn for similar reasons, noting that “Toulmin’s evolutionary view addresses the twofold problem of criteria of evaluation and general stan-dards of judgment” that Kuhn leaves unresolved (127). LaRoche and Pearson acknowledge the “great theoretical importance” of Kuhn’s ideas, but hold that for their purposes, “Polanyi’s and Toulmin’s frameworks are more fruitful” (262). And although Goggin uses the term “preparadigmatic” to describe a particular stage in composition studies’s history (325), she is more indebted to Toulmin than to Kuhn. In her telling, the discipline is not rocked by successive paradigm shifts but moves through three continuous “phases” (324–26).9

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Toulmin and the Cognitivist/Constructionist DebateToulmin is a presence as well in the cognitivist/constructionist debate that dominated composition studies in the 1980s and continues to reverberate to this day. This debate is notable both for its polarizing effects on the field and for the strong and often personal terms in which it was conducted, with advo-cates on one side objecting to cognitive approaches as plodding or ideologically pernicious and advocates on the other side dismissing such complaints for their lack of empirical grounding.10 While the cognitivist/contructionist binary remained one of composition studies’s constitutive oppositions well into the 1990s, a number of scholars writing from a variety of theoretical positions also sought to complicate or dissolve it. Several of these scholars, including Linda Brodkey, Mike Rose, and John Trimbur, look explicitly to Toulmin for help.

Brodkey’s “Writing Ethnographic Narratives,” which appeared in Written Communication in 1987, is a broad reflection on two contrasting methodolo-gies, which she terms “interpretive” and “analytical” ethnography, respectively (25, abstract). In the article, she distances herself from Flower and Hayes’s cognitivist position, urging composition scholars to attend less to artificial “protocol analyses” and more to “how writers and readers . . . negotiate their relationships in a given social context” (36). In developing this position, Brodkey uses Toulmin’s discussion of probability statements from the second chapter of The Uses of Argument to frame her reflections on whether qualitative methods of ethnographic research “lead to statements that refer to a reality discovered or constructed by the ethnographer” (29). But Toulmin is only one of many theorists to whom she refers. At various points, she also turns to Foucault, Geertz, Rorty, Kuhn, and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, among others. This range and pattern of reference leads me to infer that Brodkey is less interested in Toulmin’s specific ideas than she is in throwing his weight, along with that of these others, behind her argument.

In his 1988 College Composition and Communication article “Narrowing the Mind and Page: Remedial Writers and Cognitive Reductionism,” Mike Rose is similarly critical of efforts to apply cognitive theories to composition. Eight years earlier, he had projected optimistically that certain aspects of writer’s block could “be explained with cognitive psychology’s problem-solving framework” (“Rigid” 380) and had given notice to one of Flower and Hayes’s early papers (“Rigid” 400, note 2). By the late 1980s, Rose had become more skeptical. In his 1988 article, he is specifically concerned with the inappropriate application to “remedial” writers of various lines of thought about cognitive

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development, four of which he singles out for particular attention: research on “cognitive style,” popularizations of “brain research,” Piaget’s research on “the development of logical thought” in children, and finally, certain strains of “orality-literacy” scholarship emerging from literary studies (267; emphasis in original). Rose uses an observation Toulmin makes about Piaget in an obscure article on developmental psychology and epistemology to further his critique of misapplications of Piagetian concepts to college writers. Piaget, Rose quotes Toulmin as asserting, was interested less in discovering how children actually think than he was in charting their necessary development toward a cognitive maturity characterized by conformity “to the intellectual structures of logic, Euclidean geometry, and the other basic Kantian forms” (“Epistemology” 256, qtd. in Rose, “Narrowing” 285). Building on this insight (and also on supporting observations from the psychologists Howard Gardner and Barbara Rogoff), Rose argues that composition scholars and teachers ought to shift their focus from the purported cognitive deficiencies of remedial writers to the discursive and situated nature of writing. He does not deny that some college students fail to perform well in Piagetian tests; he simply points out that we have no warrant for inferring from this finding anything about these students’ abilities to generate “coherent, effective discourse” in practice (285).

Rose and Brodkey allow Toulmin to make only cameo appearances. They bring him forward to reinforce specific points in their broader arguments and then usher him quickly offstage. Trimbur, in contrast, gives Toulmin a major role. In his 1987 Rhetoric Review article “Beyond Cognition: The Voices in Inner Speech,” Trimbur sets out to identify a theoretical position that transcends the “‘inner/outer’ metaphor” he finds structuring much of the composition scholar-ship of the day (211). Adducing Janet Emig, James Britton, and Linda Flower as examples, he charges that composition scholars generally conceive of writing as a process that “transforms what is inside the writer’s head into an external text that can stand by itself ” (211). He then criticizes the field for conflating Piaget’s concept of “cognitive egocentrism,” which he sees as reinforcing the “ ‘inner/outer’ metaphor,” with Vygotsky’s concept of “inner speech,” which dismantles that metaphor by treating thought as “always already socialized” (212). Having made this theoretical point, however, Trimbur must still square it with the “commonsense feeling” all writers have of struggling to get out of their own heads and connect with readers (215). At this juncture, he turns to Toulmin’s 1979 article “The Inwardness of Mental Life,” which develops a distinction between “interiority,” understood as a fact of our neurophysiology,

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and “inwardness,” understood as a quality of mental experience we acquire as a joint product of our “cultural history” and our “individual development” (“Inwardness” 5, qtd. in Trimbur 215).11 This distinction, Trimbur holds, can “get us beyond the ‘inner/outer’ polarity in our talk about writing” by enabling us to historicize the feeling of “entrapment” present-day writers experience (215–16). Trimbur thus extrapolates from Toulmin to reinterpret Vygotsky’s concept of “inner speech” as a kind of Bakhtinian “polyphony” in which language “has already become discourse” (219).

Although Brodkey, Rose, and Trimbur have different concerns, they ar-rive at similar positions. They each adopt what Trimbur calls a “historical or post-cognitive perspective” (220), exhorting composition scholars to avoid abstract cognitive theorizing and to focus instead on the concrete experiences of actual writers. Brodkey counters the dominance of Flower and Hayes’s cogni-tive process model by noting that it “is only one of the ways in which research might attempt to narrate the lived experience of writers” (47). Rose similarly criticizes cognitive theory for diverting attention “from the immediate social and linguistic conditions in which the student composes,” a charge he docu-ments with a reference to three sources, two of which are strongly critical of Flower and Hayes (“Narrowing” 295).12 And Trimbur, alluding to Flower and Hayes’s conception of composition as a goal-directed, problem-solving activity, maintains that “[d]iscourse” needs to be understood not merely as a “goal the writer is trying to reach” but as the very “grounds of composing” (220).

Brodkey, Rose, and Trimbur are alike as well in their rhetorical handling of Toulmin, which exemplifies the nature of composition studies’s engagement with him in the late 1980s. All three scholars position Toulmin as an author-ity, but all three also invoke him in limited or contained ways. Brodkey makes a single, tangential connection to The Uses of Argument, but she could have appealed to Toulmin to amplify her central affirmation of the richness and particularity of lived human “experience” (26). Indeed, her conviction that nar-rative must be considered a legitimate mode of inquiry in the human sciences (26) anticipates the claims Toulmin makes for narrative in his later work.13 Rose uses a single observation of Toulmin’s regarding Piaget, but he could have found significant support in Toulmin’s works for his broader argument about the consequences of overextending scientific theories and concepts.14 Trimbur uses Toulmin to leverage a comparison of Piaget and Vygotsky, but he misses Toulmin’s repeated comments on these two figures.15

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Finally, Brodkey, Rose, and Trimbur all enlist Toulmin in efforts to trans-pose questions about cognition into questions about discourse, thus positioning him on the constructionist side of the debate, even though his position is more complex.16 In Human Understanding, Toulmin maintains that the problem of conceptual change can be viewed from complementary socio-historical and cognitive perspectives (27–28). In an interview conducted by Gary A. Olson in the early 1990s, Toulmin elaborates on this stance. He accepts the proposition “that knowledge is a social construct” so long as “being a social construct only means situated,” but he also objects to the word “social” as being “too narrow” and too political (296; emphasis in original). When pressed to differentiate himself from “social constructionists” who see reality as entirely constituted by human discourse, Toulmin states, “I don’t mind them saying it’s a social construct; it’s the moment they start saying it’s only a social construct that the trouble starts . . .” (298; emphasis in original). He then makes a point of affirm-ing the biological basis of cognition: “I think it’s important to understand,” he says, “that mental functions and even higher mental functions are refinements and extensions of organic functions” (298). Given their arguments, it is not surprising that Brodkey, Rose, and Trimbur downplay the cognitivist strain in Toulmin’s thought. It is surprising, however, to find Flower overlooking it as well. Her 1989 article “Cognition, Context, and Theory Building” contains a passing reference to Toulmin’s early book Foresight and Understanding, but she fails to make any connection to Toulmin’s subsequent work, even though the project she announces in the article—to “understand how cognition and context interact” (283)—is entirely consonant with Toulmin’s own.

Criticisms of ToulminIn the 1980s and into the early 1990s, I have noted, composition scholars who cite Toulmin generally treat him as an authority. Rather than subjecting him to critique, they use a range of his ideas—disciplinary filters, enculturation, trans-mits, compact and diffuse disciplines, and interiority and inwardness, among others—to frame and facilitate their own analyses and arguments. In the mid-1990s, composition scholars begin to treat Toulmin more ambivalently. While some continue to celebrate him as an important epistemic or constructionist rhetorician, others reject what they see as his outmoded humanism. Likewise, while some continue to use and endorse the Toulmin model, others express increasing doubts about its pedagogical utility. Also at this time, composition scholars begin to lose sight of Toulmin’s concern with conceptual change. Refer-

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ences to The Uses of Argument continue to appear in the literature, but refer-ences to Human Understanding decline. One consequence of this development is that the layout of argument Toulmin advances in the earlier book receives more criticism for its purported formalism than it did in previous decades.17

The first of these trends is exemplified by Arabella Lyon’s “‘The Good Man Speaking Well,’ or Business as Usual,” a response to Toulmin’s interview with Olson. Lyon paints Toulmin as an old-school liberal whom time and composi-tion studies have passed by. Where Brodkey and Trimbur see Toulmin as the traveling companion of such A-list theorists as Foucault, Geertz, and Bakhtin, Lyon unfavorably compares what she terms his “Convergence pluralism” to the “Anti-pluralism” of Gayatri Spivak and bell hooks, on the one hand, and to the “Tolerant pluralism” of Annette Kolodny, on the other (262; emphasis in original). She acknowledges the value of his persistent critique of rational-ism but sees the “new humanism” (261) he heralds as having little to offer to current conversations. At the end of her essay, she writes that “once [we] have accepted Toulmin’s arguments for reason over rationality and the situated-ness of knowledge (and who hasn’t in 1993?), the next step seems to be the consideration of power and difference” (263). This is the step that, in Lyon’s view, Toulmin never takes.18

The second of these trends is exemplified most clearly by Richard Fulker-son’s increasingly skeptical posture toward the Toulmin model.19 In the 1980s, Fulkerson expresses a cautious optimism regarding the model’s potential to facilitate writing instruction (“Logic” 204–05), but by the mid-1990s, he is left wondering “whether the efforts needed to adapt and master the model are worth the benefits they might have” (“Toulmin” 65). This trend manifests itself less obviously but perhaps more tellingly in a corresponding shift in how composition scholars position the Toulmin model in their work. When the model was first introduced into composition studies, it quickly established itself as an alternative to formalist approaches to teaching argument, and composition scholars regularly sought to ally their pedagogical proposals with it. In the 1990s, we begin to see if not a reversal of this pattern then at least a significant complication of it. Rather than banking on the capital of the Toul-min model, a number of scholars use it as a foil for their alternative proposals. Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor’s references to the model over more than a ten-year period illustrate this development.20 In the 1980s and early 1990s, they repeatedly support their argument for a composition pedagogy based on classical rhetoric by suggesting that classical rhetoric can be aligned or

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reconciled with the Toulmin model (“Teaching” 25; “Stases” 429; “Rhetoric” 84). In the mid-1990s, in contrast, they support this same argument by noting the model’s purported deficiencies as an invention heuristic: “Our approach,” they write in 1996, “is based on the conviction that classical rhetoric is an art of argument in a state of completeness and elaboration that no other current rationale approximates” (“Classical” 101).

The third of these trends, a narrowing of composition scholars’ range of reference with respect to Toulmin, is exemplified by several scholars who cite The Uses of Argument but miss other ways in which Toulmin might have been useful to them. For instance, in their 1989 article “Novelty in Academic Writ-ing,” David S. Kaufer and Cheryl Geisler put forth four propositions about the rhetorical functions of “authorial newness” that resonate with the conception of disciplinary discourse Toulmin develops in Human Understanding, but they do not mention that work (288–89). They also cite The Uses of Argument in a discussion of how “novelty claims” are warranted in different disciplines and take philosophical arguments about ethics as a primary example, but they fail to note that Toulmin writes extensively on ethics and even employs the methods they describe. In a 1997 article, Christopher Schroeder treats a scathing critique of Human Understanding by literary scholar Paul A. Bové as if it were a critique of Toulmin’s model of argument (103), but Bové never mentions Toulmin’s model, and Schroeder never cites Human Understanding. Finally, in a 2001 essay on the ethics of teaching writing, Candace Spigelman makes a passing reference to The Uses of Argument (323) but does not take up Toulmin’s work on ethics and ethical reasoning. This omission is particularly telling, for the conundrum with which she wrestles—how teachers can square their commitment to certain moral principles with the need to respond flexibly and sensitively to individual pieces of student writing—is an instance of the general problem Toulmin addresses in his work on casuistry.21

To be clear, I do not mean to suggest that composition scholars writing after the 1980s ignore Toulmin’s broader thought entirely. Works of Toulmin’s other than The Uses of Argument are occasionally cited to the present day. Nor am I suggesting that scholars who cite only The Uses of Argument are necessarily remiss in not acknowledging other works of Toulmin’s that may have some rel-evance to their projects. All scholars are inevitably selective in their references, and using one or another of a thinker’s ideas does not create an obligation to use them all. Rather, I am noting a pattern in the discourse of composition studies that tells us something about Toulmin’s evolving standing in the discipline.

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As the high-theory 1980s fade into history, we witness a declining interest in those works of Toulmin’s that do not bear directly on composition pedagogy. While The Uses of Argument and An Introduction to Reasoning remain familiar to many composition scholars, his work in areas other than argument theory receives less notice now than it once did.

As our discipline loses sight of what Wartofsky described as Toulmin’s “many-sided” but “coherent” intellectual program, we run an increased risk of misinterpreting those works of Toulmin’s we do continue to read. James L. Kastely’s 1999 College English article “From Formalism to Inquiry: A Model of Argument in Antigone” stands as a case in point. Kastely objects to “formalist” courses that focus on how arguments work but that neglect to raise the prior question of “why one argues” in the first place (222). He then proposes an alter-native course that would interrogate the preconditions of civil argument and impart moral lessons about the danger of absolute conviction and the necessity of remaining open to multiple positions. Kastely’s proposal is defensible and even laudable. I sympathize with his conviction that education should foster “a discourse appropriate to a complex democracy” (240). I imagine also that Toulmin would find much to admire in Kastely’s proposed course, since it aims to raise just the sort of framing question to which Toulmin himself is drawn as a philosopher.22

Nevertheless, I must take issue with Kastely’s specific treatment of Toul-min, whom he positions as a metonym for the formalist approach he rejects. Kastely assumes that the shortcomings he perceives in pedagogies based on the Toulmin model stem from deficiencies in Toulmin’s original conception of it. He therefore endeavors to demonstrate the inadequacies of such pedago-gies by finding fault with the particular account of argument Toulmin gives in the third chapter of The Uses of Argument. The force of Kastely’s critique is vitiated, however, by his misunderstanding of Toulmin’s general philosophical views as well as by his misinterpretation of the specific agenda Toulmin pur-sues in his 1958 book. Kastely paints Toulmin as a positivist who embraces a correspondence theory of meaning. Toulmin’s “most important” theoretical principle, Kastely asserts, is the notion “that a good argument is one that best corresponds to a reality that exists outside of, prior to, and independent of a particular dispute” (227–28). Yet it is precisely Toulmin’s strong rejection of this position that has made him an influential philosopher of science and a valuable theoretical resource for composition studies.23 Kastely also misses the point of the examples Toulmin includes in his chapter. One of Toulmin’s aims

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is to show how rare analytic arguments actually are. To this end, he constructs a number of arguments that have the form of traditional syllogisms and then shows why they are not analytic. Toulmin’s examples are counterexamples, but Kastely construes them as general paradigms and proceeds to criticize them as “forced” (228).

Because of these errors, Kastely condemns Toulmin in the name of po-sitions Toulmin himself embraces. Seeking an alternative to the formalistic approach to argument represented by the Toulmin model, Kastely turns to Sophocles’s Antigone, which he reads as a meditation on the preconditions that make reasonable argument possible. For Kastely, Creon and Antigone both place themselves “beyond argument” (229), Creon through his “self-confirming rationality” (231) and Antigone through the “single-minded intensity of her commitment” to principle, represented by her “duty” to her dead brother (232). “The necessary precondition for argument,” Kastely holds, “is a serious respect for difference” (230). This, however, is not a statement Toulmin would reject. In fact, he identifies himself as an “antiformalist” (Knowing vii; emphasis in original) and places himself at the end of a grand pragmatic tradition that begins with Socrates and runs through Montaigne, Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Rorty (Return to Reason 170). Toulmin objects to absolute adherence to principle and rampant rationality for the same reasons Kastely does, because they occlude difference and flatten out what Kastely calls “the rich complexity of human existence” (232).24 Had Kastely attended to Toulmin’s broader thought rather than to his layout of argument in isolation, he would have found in Toulmin an ally rather than an opponent.

Engaging Toulmin TodayIf we consider the citation data alone, it might seem that composition stud-ies’s engagement with Toulmin has largely run its course. However, variations of the Toulmin model continue to populate composition textbooks, and so long as this is the case, Toulmin will remain a necessary topic of discussion for composition scholars. By way of conclusion, therefore, I want to propose some avenues for further inquiry and research. Specifically, I want to suggest that as a discipline we need to give far more notice than we yet have to the works Toulmin wrote after what Sonya K. Foss, Karen A. Foss, and Robert Trapp call his “clear rhetorical turn” (118): The Abuse of Casuistry, coauthored with Albert R. Jonsen; Cosmopolis; and Return to Reason.

Historically, the debate over the Toulmin model has centered on its useful-ness as an invention heuristic. Its value in facilitating the retrospective criticism

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of arguments has never been seriously questioned, but there has been much diversity of opinion regarding its usefulness to writers working to generate arguments. Until recently, this debate has been largely theoretical in character, but over the past decade or so, discussions of the Toulmin model in composi-tion studies have taken a more pragmatic turn. Fulkerson, for instance, holds that we have had enough “theorizing and philosophizing” about the model and calls for “further careful research” into its efficacy “when adapted accurately yet creatively” (“Toulmin” 68). This qualification is significant, for it highlights the fact that the Toulmin model has rarely appeared in pure form in either the literature on composition pedagogy or in composition textbooks. Charles W. Kneupper maps it onto the traditional outline (239–41). James F. Stratman explores the possibility of using it in conjunction with sentence combining. David S. Kaufer and Christine M. Neuwirth propose integrating it with formal logic (380–82, 388). Fahnestock and Secor, and also Fulkerson, suggest that it might be reconciled with stasis theory (Fahnestock and Secor, “Teaching” 25; Fulkerson, “Toulmin” 67–68). The history of the Toulmin model in composition studies is largely a story of alterations and hybridizations.

As if in answer to Fulkerson’s call, Karen J. Lunsford studied the uses to which the Toulmin model was put in a summer composition program for high school students. Her research shows that students as well as teachers and scholars must be considered active agents in the model’s adaptation. What she found was that the meaning of Toulmin’s terms, as well as the relationships among them, constantly shifted as students and teachers used them in class discussions, blended them with terms from other frameworks, and adjusted them to better suit their own ends. In a 2002 article documenting this research, she sweeps aside the question that had governed discussions of the Toulmin model for over twenty years, declaring theoretical questions about the model’s heuristic potential “essentially moot.” All parties involved in the program, she notes, “were continuously reconstruing the Toulminian model in various forms . . . depending on their goals at any single time” (160). Fulkerson’s exhortation and Lunsford’s conclusion are essentially Toulminian. Indeed, the work of both scholars suggests that the Toulmin model should be regarded less as a static formalism than as a “transmit” that will and should continue to evolve as it is passed down and put to various uses over time.

Like Fulkerson and Lunsford, I believe that we can use additional empiri-cal studies of applications of the Toulmin model. But I also believe that we can still benefit from “theorizing and philosophizing.” If, however, we are to pursue these activities responsibly today, we cannot pretend that Toulmin’s thinking

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on argument ended in 1979 with the publication of An Introduction to Reason-ing. Rather, we must take into account its further development as manifested in the books he published in the last twenty years, that is to say, in the years following his “rhetorical turn.”

We might even group The Uses of Argument with these later works to inter-esting effect. The Uses of Argument is Toulmin’s third book, after An Examination of the Place of Reason in Ethics and The Philosophy of Science: An Introduction, but it is also in a sense his last, having been reissued in an “Updated Edition” in 2003. In the preface to this new edition, Toulmin explicitly associates The Uses of Argument with Return to Reason, Cosmopolis, and especially The Abuse of Casuistry, and he offers us some hints as to how he would like his 1958 book to be read today. Toulmin begins this preface somewhat whimsically, comparing himself to the delighted parent of a child who has grown up, gone forth into the world, and become something entirely unexpected.25 But he also takes on a bit of an edge. After reiterating what has become his standard disclaimer about the book’s intended purpose—“In no way had I set out to expound a theory of rhetoric or argumentation”—he notes with some irony that many readers seem to have consigned him “to a premature death” (vii). Toulmin was eighty years old when he wrote these lines, but in them, he is doing more than merely celebrating his longevity. He is also, I believe, chiding those of us in fields that have propagated the Toulmin model for inordinately emphasizing his early work and largely ignoring his mature thought. As the preface continues, Toul-min goes out of his way to draw attention to The Abuse of Casuistry, which he identifies as the “first solid product” of a “change of mind” that led him to a new appreciation for Aristotle’s pragmatism (viii).

This turn strikes me as peculiar. Why would Toulmin direct our atten-tion to a co-authored book published almost a decade and a half earlier? The answer, I believe, is that in commenting on Aristotle’s pragmatism, Toulmin is emphasizing his own. If he does not rewrite The Uses of Argument literally, he rewrites it figuratively by giving such prominent notice to The Abuse of Casu-istry, which opens by updating his approach to argument much as he says he would if he were to revise his earlier work. Its first chapter recasts his earlier distinction between “analytic” and “substantial” arguments (Uses 114–32) as a more explicitly pragmatic distinction between theoretical and practical modes of reasoning:

Theoretical arguments are chains of proof, whereas practical arguments are meth-ods for resolving problems. In the first, formal sense, an argument is a “chain” of propositions, linked up so as to guarantee its conclusion. In the second, substan-

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tive sense, an argument is a network of considerations, presented so as to resolve a practical quandary. (Abuse 34; emphasis in original)

This conception does not conflict with the treatments of argument in The Uses of Argument and An Introduction to Reasoning, but it does expand them in important ways. In particular, the construal of practical arguments as methods rather than as products softens Toulmin’s earlier insistence that reasoning be regarded as a retrospective, critical activity and not as a prospective, creative one (see Uses 5–8; Introduction 9). The relaxing of this distinction allows Jonsen and Toulmin to acknowledge and accommodate non-propositional forms of argument, such as analogy and pattern recognition (Abuse 40–41), in a way that Toulmin in his earlier work cannot. In Return to Reason, Toulmin expands his conception of argument still further. He embraces narrative as a mode of reasoning that can “have a kind of weight that mathematical formulas do not” (123) and elevates Virginia Woolf over even Wittgenstein by declaring her a modern-day Montaigne (202). While these developments have dismayed some of Toulmin’s philosophical readers,26 they should be more amenable to composition scholars, especially those who have reservations about the pur-ported formalism of his original layout. At the very least, they should make us optimistic about the prospects for creatively adapting Toulmin’s ideas about argument to the exigencies of the present time.

Notes

1. See Clauss 172–236 and Fulkerson (“Toulmin”) for detailed discussions of the reception of the Toulmin model in composition studies.

2. The following journals were surveyed: College English (1975–2007), College Composition and Communication (1975–2007), Freshman English News and Com-position Studies (1986–2006), JAC (1980–2007), Pre/Text (1980–1995), Rhetoric Review (1982–2006), Rhetoric Society Quarterly (1976–2007), Teaching English in the Two-Year College (1975–2006), and Written Communication (1984–2007). This list was derived from Connors (“Journals”) and Goggin. For the purposes of this study, undocumented references were ignored.

3. Toulmin and Kuhn were born in 1922. Perelman was born in 1912. Toulmin’s The Uses of Argument and Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s La Nouvelle Rhétorique appeared in 1958. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions appeared in 1962.

4. But compare Loui’s broader study of Toulmin citations in English-language publications across all fields, which suggests that the absolute number of citations of The Uses of Argument is trending upward while citations of The New Rhetoric are declining (32–33).

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5. Beyond The Uses of Argument, Human Understanding, and An Introduction to Reasoning, I have located citations to six other books—The Abuse of Casuistry (1988), Cosmopolis (1990), An Examination of the Place of Reason in Ethics (1950), Foresight and Understanding (1961), Return to Reason (2001), and Wittgenstein’s Vienna (1973)—and four essays: “Logic and the Criticism of Arguments” (1983), “The Inwardness of Mental Life” (1979), “Epistemology and Developmental Psy-chology” (1981), and “Does the Distinction between Normal and Revolutionary Science Hold Water?” (1970).

6. Scott takes The Uses of Argument as his point of departure in his early article “On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic” (10). Connors invokes Toulmin to support his contention that from a rhetorical perspective, “agreement must constitute knowledge” (“Robert” 182). Goggin similarly notes that Toulmin “calls attention to the rhetorical nature of intellectual enterprises” (323) and Winsor cites Toulmin along with Polanyi and Perelman in support of her precept that all writing “is firmly embedded in a social web” (“Engineer’s” 271). My reference to Rorty, Kuhn, and Fish follows Schilb’s observation that these theorists were particularly favored by composition scholars in the 1980s (63).

7. In Human Understanding, Toulmin strongly differentiates his “evolutionary ac-count” from Kuhn’s “revolutionary account” of conceptual change (122; emphasis in original).

8. In “Composition Studies and Science,” Connors rejects Kuhn for the ostensible reason that composition studies is not a scientific discipline, which means that Kuhn’s model does not apply to it. But if this were truly Connors’s reason, he would have to reject Toulmin also, for the model of disciplinarity Toulmin proposes in Human Understanding likewise derives from the sciences. Connors’s 1984 article “Journals in Composition Studies” suggests to me that the real reason he preferred Toulmin to Kuhn was that he saw the development of composition studies as a gradual and incremental—rather than a revolutionary—process.

9. Goggin’s article includes a note justifying her seemingly “strange” decision “to cite Toulmin and Kuhn together” (340, note 9). That Goggin feels compelled to of-fer such an explanation indicates that Toulmin and Kuhn were generally regarded as contrasting figures.

10. See Berlin 481–83; Bizzell 221–37; and Flower, Construction 104–05.

11. This article is also cited in passing by Bruffee (640, note 4).

12. Rose cites Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University,” Bizzell’s “Cognition, Con-vention, and Certainty,” and a research report by McCormick titled The Cultural Imperatives Underlying Cognitive Acts. The first two of these sources explicitly criticize Flower and Hayes.

13. See, for example, Return to Reason 123–37, 190–203.

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14. See, for example, The Return to Cosmology 32.

15. See, for example, Human Understanding 9, 37, 164, 419–26, 444, 475.

16. Hubbuch stands as another illustration of composition scholars’ tendency to place Toulmin in the constructionist camp. Hubbuch embraces a notion of mean-ing “drawn from cognitive science” (76) but uses Toulmin to represent “[s]ocial constructionists” as a group (82).

17. The process through which the Toulmin model entered first speech communi-cation and then composition studies has exaggerated its formalist aspects. When Brockriede and Ehninger introduced the Toulmin model into speech communi-cation in 1960, they isolated his diagrams of the layout from his more ruminative prose, thereby suggesting that Toulmin understood reasoning in formalistic terms (Eemeren et al. 194). When Kneupper introduced the model into composition stud-ies in 1978, he relied heavily on Brockriede and Ehninger and similarly emphasized Toulmin’s diagrams. Prior has recently identified the “relative clarity” of Toulmin’s diagrams as a factor that has led scholars to miss the “sociohistoric dimension” of Toulmin’s ideas about argument (132).

18. Bové makes a similar criticism, but in a more sustained fashion and in far stronger terms.

19. For a discussion of Fulkerson’s treatment of the Toulmin model, see Clauss 209–20.

20. Another case in point is provided by Rice, who proposes an approach to teach-ing argument grounded in the metaphor of “digital sampling” as an alternative to “traditional” approaches based on the Toulmin model (453).

21. See especially The Abuse of Casuistry, which is acknowledged by Kroll and Booth.

22. See, for example, Knowing and Acting, in which Toulmin describes a “typically philosophical” question as one that asks how something is “possible at all” (24–25; emphasis in original).

23. In his first book, An Examination of the Place of Reason in Ethics (1950), Toulmin maintains that the correspondence theory holds for the narrow case of descriptive sentences (74–78). But his entire oeuvre can be construed as a response to logical positivism, of which the correspondence theory was a main pillar. See, for example, his 1969 essay “From Logical Analysis to Conceptual History,” in which he describes the positivist movement as a “radical surgery that was intended to kill philosophy” but “ended by improving its health” (53).

24. Statements to this effect run throughout Toulmin’s writings. See, for example, The Abuse of Casuistry: “A prudent, understanding judge or agent can never treat universal laws or principles as absolute or invariable. There is always room for discretion in asking how far general rules, as they stand, apply to particular fresh cases” (68).

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25. See also Olson (291) and Swearingen (265–66) for other instances in which Toulmin denies having a personal stake in the reception of the Toulmin model.

26. One reviewer writing in Mind describes Return to Reason as a book in which “[e]verything and anything is thrown in, as the linking of Montaigne and Virginia Woolf might suggest, but with very little discrimination” (O’Hear 576).

AcknowledgmentsI thank Tara Gellene, Benjamin Miller, Brooke Morrill, and Michelle Shafer for their help with research and the journal’s anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions. I especially thank Joseph M. Williams for talking with me about a draft of this article. I dedicate this article to him.

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Joseph BizupJoseph Bizup is an associate professor of English at Boston University, where he directs the College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program. His research inter-ests include writing pedagogy, writing program administration, and theories of argumentation.

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