Return to Reason

The turmoil and brutality of the 20th 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 21st century with hope? In this text, Stephen Toulmin argues that the potential 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 modelled 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 that is human nature as an essential beginning for all intellectual inquiry.

About the Author :
Stephen Toulmin is Henry R. Luce Professor at University of Southern California, and author of, among other books, Cosmopolis and The Uses of Argument.

Review :
In this mature work, Toulmin...sums up a distinguished scholarly career spent tenaciously pursuing this and related questions. He adroitly integrates the arguments from his previous works...in a broad, humanistic vision of how to restore the balance of reason maintained in Greek antiquity...Toulmin employs a rich array of examples and accessible prose...Recommended.--T. B. Leiniger"Choice" (04/01/2002) The argument in the book is wide-ranging and fluently expressed...Toulmin has taken on board arguments presented in debate by experienced practitioners, such as in the account of development economists and the water systems in Bali, his favorite vignette to illustrate the situatedness of economic relations. He ranges across the disciplines from astronomy to international relations, with a concern for professions, government policy making and the role of NGOs.--Richard Ennals "Concepts and Transformation " There is now a 'loss of confidence'...in our traditional ideas about rationality, according to Toulmin. Especially among those in the humanities, he argues, the claims of rationality have been progressively challenged over the last 20 or 30 years, to the point of being sidelined. This is a common complaint and not exactly news, but Toulmin does not merely bemoan and rant, as many others have done. He offers a diagnosis and a solution. Rationality has come under threat, he believes, because of the undue influence of classical mechanics and abstract mathematical methods on our idea of what intelligent problem-solving should be. Deduction in the style of Euclid's geometry, mechanically predictable and rigorous law in the style of Galileo and Newton, indubitable certainty in the style of Descartes' 'I think, therefore I am' all exert a malign influence, insofar as they overshadow a looser, more pragmatic and less abstract concept of 'reasonableness.' What we need is more open-minded, infor Toulmin shows in this readable and fascinating account, the practice of reason that produced modern science goes back to the 17th century, when traditional reasonableness was replaced by the model of geometry...Eventually--and this is perhaps one of Toulmin's most challenging insights--what came of this change is the system of disciplines that govern modern intellectual life...Throughout "Return to Reason", Toulmin calmly addresses complex situations arising in modern disciplines. Indeed, the knack he shows for reasonableness illustrates his thesis. His book is both a diagnosis and, by example, a cure for what ails our scientific culture.--Thomas D'Evelyn"Christian Science Monitor" (08/16/2001) 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. vision of how to restore the balance of reason maintained in Greek antiquity...Toulmin employs a rich array of examples and accessible prose...Recommended. In elegant prose, Toulmin...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.