Toulmin, Stephen

Stephen Edelston Toulmin was a London-born philosopher (1933–2009) well known in Europe and the USA. He taught for many years at the University of Chicago and then at the University of Southern California. A Ph.D. in philosophy at Cambridge, his early work focused particularly on Ludwig Wittgenstein. Toulmin authored 22 books on a wide range of subjects.

Toulmin's general significance as a philosopher was broad: the philosophy of science, moral reasoning, the critique of both absolutist logic and Platonism and a synthetic critique of Cartesianism based on a more experiential, human and complex view of the world and his linkage of pragmatic and Aristotelian philosophy through science and technology studies in medical anthropology and action research. An elegant writer, Toulmin had a discerning ethnographic eye and the ability to move back and forth among engagement in concrete, pragmatic and policy questions; the history of ideas and philosophical theory and reasoning. He particularly focused on ethics and moral reasoning through extensive work on the dilemmas of ethical treatment of human subjects in research, in medicine and in organizational research. In this way, he contributed to the revitalization of pragmatic philosophy by combining it with systems theory in his work in science and technology studies.

His general significance to the field of action research resides in his unique combination of pragmatic and linguistic philosophy. Through his connections to the Scandinavian action research networks, particularly those of Björn Gustavsen, he became a participant in the evaluation and consolidation of a number of large-scale Norwegian and Swedish action research projects. Gustavsen was working hard to bring the ‘linguistic turn’ from Wittgenstein into action research, arguing that language games were key to larger goals of creating learning networks of action researchers along which new ideas and practices would diffuse. Toulmin's competence in Wittgenstein's work was indisputable, but he added his detailed familiarity with Aristotelian philosophy and American pragmatism to this mix, work that resulted in the revitalization of pragmatism and particularly a focus on Aristotle's [Page 785]concept of phrónêsis or clinical or prudential reasoning in context.

Rather than emphasizing the abstract, theoretical habits of contemporary philosophy, Toulmin used his combination of linguistic philosophy, borrowings from Aristotle and neo-pragmatism to press both philosophers and action researchers to operate differently. For the philosophers, he argued, as he did throughout his career, for direct engagement in messy, empirical struggles on the grounds that philosophy's reasoning tools should be made valuable through application in real-world contexts. For the action researchers, he unsettled the constant tendency of practitioners to eschew theoretical and intellectually defensible reasoning about their projects and merely tell stories. He urged them to take responsibility for and create a language adequate to translating empirical cases into challenges to larger understandings about modernity, social democracy and the welfare state. Thus, he issued a challenge to both philosophers and action researchers to meet on a middle ground between cases and abstract theory and build an enriched understanding of both.

Toulmin's work was part of a significant revival of interest in action research in the work of Aristotle, and it is now part of the core discourse of the field of action research. A major publication in this area was Bent Flyvbjerg's book, Making Social Science Matter, which gained attention for the Aristotelian distinctions between theoria, téchnê and phrónêsis and Olav Eikeland's tour de force, The Ways of Aristotle, the work of a Ph.D. philosopher with a quarter century of work in action research at the Work Research Institute of Oslo, Norway. As a guide to Aristotle, Eikeland's text is far and away the most comprehensive and complex. He argues that both Toulmin and Flyvbjerg abstract phrónêsis out of its larger context in Aristotle and make it too easy for the non-expert to assume that phrónêsis alone should be the basis for action research. Eikeland shows persuasively that all modes of knowing were celebrated and validated in the Aristotelian system and that using phrónêsis well requires us to develop nuanced understandings and methods based on theoria and téchnê as well.

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