Abstract

Lacking a subtitle as it does, the name of this work might lead one unfamiliar with Stephen Toulmin’s previous writings to expect an extended criticism and condemnation of postmodern thought and its skeptical excesses; although postmodernity also is implicitly caught in the dragnet of the argument, the book’s target is in fact modernity. Expanding upon a theme introduced in his previous books The Uses of Argument and Cosmopolis, in Return to Reason Toulmin reflects on the origin and spread of the Cartesian obsession with demanding mathematical rigor in every inquiry seeking to be dubbed “science,” from the birth of mathematical physics in the seventeenth century to economics, sociology, and ethics in the nineteenth and twentieth. Explicitly stated in the introductory chapter, Toulmin’s thesis is that this modern focus on what he calls “rationality” has eclipsed the more moderate, and in fact ancient, goal of “ reasonableness,” meaning “substantive argumentation” that “has the body and force needed to carry conviction” and “to put a conclusion ‘ beyond a reasonable doubt’”. Following a semiautobiographic approach—anyone expecting a theoretical analysis, he explains, “misses the point. …The only way to proceed, … is to go behind all the rival theoretical positions and present a narrative with a personal perspective” —Toulmin’s aim is “to steer a middle way, and to show how the idea of Reasonableness [sic] lets us keep on an even keel” that will allow us to “reestablish the proper balance between Theory and Practice, Logic and Rhetoric, Rationality and Reasonableness”. Thus the work is not only a critique of modernity, but also an outline of how we can undo, and in many ways are already undoing, its latent errors.