Abstract
The last paper I heard Imre Lakatos deliver1 was a scathing critique of Stephen Toulmin’s 1972 book Human Understanding. Shrewdly spotting the Wittgensteinianism of its emphasis on context, practice, and the proliferated polymorphism of its account of rationality, he predicted that the massive three-volume project would never be — could not in the nature of the case — be finished. He suggested that since the history and practice of science are, according to Toulmin, infinitely various and diverse, cases can be endlessly explored, examples must endlessly proliferate, and all descriptions would have to end with, ‘and so on’, ‘etc.’, or ‘...’. For Toulmin, Imre suggested, a full stop had become a category mistake.
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Notes
At an L.S.E. seminar presided over by John Watkins, in the autumn of 1972.
Imre Lakatos, ‘Proofs and Refutations’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 14 (1963–4), 1–25, 120–39, 121–45, 296–342.
Mill John Stuart, System of Logic, Introduction.
The best discussion of this I know is in Alan Musgrave’s Ph.D. thesis, ‘Impersonal Knowledge: A Criticism of Subjectivism in Epistemology’, University of London, 1969. A section has appeared as ‘George Boole and Psychologism’, in Scientia (July-August 1972), 1–16.
By S. Korner in Mind 68 (1959), 425–7;
D. J. O’Connor in Philosophy, 34 (1959), 244–5;
J. C. Cooley in Journal of Philosophy 56 (1959), 297–319. The favourable review is by Will, F. L., in Philosophical Review 69 (1969), 399–403. The Australasian Journal of Philosophy, the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, the Journal of Symbolic Logic, Philosophical Quaterly and Philosophy of Science appear to have ignored it.
See Korner, op. cit.
As pointed out by Wisdom, J. O., in The Sceptic at Bay’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 9 (1958), 159–63;
Bartley III, W. W., ‘Achilles, the Tortoise and Explanation in Science and History’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 15 (1962), 15–33.
For the notion of concept-stretching see Lakatos, op. cit., especially p. 314.
Bartley III, W. W., The Retreat to Commitment, New York 1962; ‘Rationality versus The Theory of Rationality’, in M. Bunge (ed.), The Critical Approach to Science and Philosophy, New York 1964, pp. 3–31.
Neither of these arguments strike this reader at least as serious paradigms of reasoning in any field. Moreover, they are of greatly unequal merit — certainly many sociologists and philosophers of science would baulk at a logic which made the Petersen argument valid. Cooley remarks in a footnote to his review (op. cit.) that Toulmin’s book is in danger of making all arguers like Molière’s hero: they turn out to have been talking logic all along.
Carroll, Lewis, ‘What the Tortoise said to Achilles’, Mind, N.S. 4, 278.
See Bartley, ‘Achilles, etc.’, Op. cit. See also Russell, Bertrand, Principles of Mathematics, London 1903, p. 35.
Why it is common, and how the two came to be confused, is explained by Popper (Conjectures and Refutations, London 1903, p. 203) in the following passage:
The fact that, to every well-known rule of inference there corresponds a logically true hypothetical or conditional formula of some well-known calculus… has led to confusion between rules of inference and the corresponding conditional formulae. But there are important differences. (1) Rules of inference are always statements about statements, or about classes of statements (they are ‘meta-linguistic’); but the formulae of the calculi are not. (2) The rules of inference are unconditional statements about deducibility; but the corresponding formulae of the calculi are conditional or hypothetical ‘If… then’ statements, which do not mention deducibility or inference, or premises or conclusions. (3) A rule of inference, after substitution of constants for the variables, asserts something about a certain argument… namely, that this argument is valid; but the corresponding formula, after substitution, yields a logical truism; i.e. a statement such as ‘All tables are tables,’ although in hypothetical form, as for example, ‘If it is a table, then it is a table’ or ‘if all men are mortal, and all Greeks are men, then all Greeks are mortal.’ (4) The rules of inference are never used as premisses in those arguments which are formulated in accordance with them; but the corresponding formulae are used in this way. In fact, one of the main motives in constructing logical calculi is this: by using… those hypothetical truisms which correspond to a certain rule of inference… as a premiss we can dispense with the corresponding rule of inference. By this method we can eliminate all the different rules of inference - except one, the [modus ponendo ponens] (or two, if we make use of the ‘principle of substitution,’ which, however, can be avoided).
See especially those by Cohen, L. Joathan, in British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 24 (1973), 41–61;
Larry Briskman, The Philosophical Quarterly 24 (1974), 160–9.
Gellner, E., ‘Concepts and Society’, Transactions of the Fifth World Congress of Sociology 1 (1962), 153–83; ‘Sociology and Social Anthropology’, Transactions of the Sixth World Congress of Sociology 2 (1967), 49–83; Thought and Change, London, 1965.
Popper, K. R., The Open Society and Its Enemies, London, 1945 et seq., Vol. I, pp. 176 et seq., (1962 ed.).
Cranmer-Byng, J. L., ‘Lord Macartney’s Embassy to Peking in 1793 from Official Chinese Documents’, Journal of Oriental Studies 4 (1957–8), 117–187.
“The antecedent state does not produce the subsequent one, but the relation between them is exclusively chronological.” Durkheim, Emile, The Rules of Sociological Method, Chicago 1938 (original 1895, paperback 1964), p. 118.
This is clear from the work of Bartley III, W. W., ‘Rationality versus The Theory of Rationality; op. cit.
Cf. Martin Hollis, ‘Reason and Ritual’, Philosophy 43 (1967), 231–47.
A theory that is still developing, see Settle, Tom, Agassi, Joseph, and Jarvie, I. C, ‘Towards a Theory of Openness to Criticism’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 4 (1974), 83–90, and the literature cited there.
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Jarvie, I.C. (1976). Toulmin and the Rationality of Science. In: Cohen, R.S., Feyerabend, P.K., Wartofsky, M.W. (eds) Essays in Memory of Imre Lakatos. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 39. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1451-9_20
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