Stephen Toulmin: Rationality and Reasonableness
Stephen Toulmin, Britsh philosopher who had taught in the United States since 1965, died earlier this month.
From a 1997 interview in Humanities, in which his ideas foreshadow Paul Hawken's writing in Blessed Unrest.
There is so much in high school textbooks, in orthodox philosophy of science, in all kinds of much published, much read, much assimilated public thought, which takes it for granted that Galileo and Descartes and Hobbes were embarking on a great new positive direction and that this mathematization of thought was a splendid and admirable thing. In some ways, it's true. It bore all kinds of fruit. But, at the same time, these formal achievements have been allowed to cloud our vision of the other half of our modern inheritance, which goes back a bit further to Erasmus and Thomas More, to Cervantes and Rabelais, to Montaigne and Shakespeare, and people who lived and wrote and contributed before the beginning of modern science and modern philosophy as the academies and schools know it.
At the present time what we see is a convergence of these two traditions. The domination of an ideal of rationality rather than a reasonableness has been receding, so that now we find people in all kinds of fields recognizing that the technicalities and mathematical formulations of that tradition need always to be looked at as contributing or failing to contribute to humane ideals and to humane achievements. ...
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers used to build canals and locks and cut up the countryside quite lightheartedly on the basis of technical specifications, which their theories have yet to justify. Now the whole question of environmental impact and ecological consequences is a central part of the public face of engineering. ...
[I]f you had said to Rachel Carson in her last years that by the mid 1990s no government in the world with any pretension to respectability would fail to have some kind of environmental protection agency, it would have appeared quite incredible to her. ...
In this respect I've been increasingly struck by the role which nongovernmental organizations play in the world. To the extent that people look for the creation of what they call civil society we can find the beginnings of it on an effective level more by looking at the way in which these transnational nongovernmental organizations operate than by looking at the ways in which official nation-state governments operate. That, for me, is a genuinely new feature of the world, and one which leads us back to look with interest at things that happened long ago, before the beginning of modernity. ...
One of the great virtues of nongovernmental organizations is that they are able, in a new kind of way, to practice the politics of shame rather than the politics of force. The moment Amnesty International buys its first machine gun, its moral authority would be destroyed. It's the fact that they are speaking for a very widespread consensus about what is and is not tolerable behavior by governments that gives them political influence.
And from the 1961 book Foresight and Understanding:
Like all great critical activities, Science has not one, but a number of related aims: it must try to satisfy these as far as possible in harmony, and it is entitled to take on fresh aims.
Any activity so varied in scope has, inevitably, a history with many phases: many legitimate enquiries had to be undertaken before the modern tribunal of experimental verification could have its present-day relevance. There is room in the scientific activity today also for men of many talents. Speculative imagination, scrupulous honesty, mathematical command, logical perspicuity, as well as experimental inventiveness and ingenuity: these are all relevant to the manifold aims of Science, in its broadest sense.
Here we see the most serious defect in the predictivist account of science: it gives the false impression that the possibilities are closed. Once before, in Hellenistic times, scientists came to see their tasks as restricted to mathematical forecasting: what followed was disastrous.
For most of us nowadays the task of understanding Nature is a wider one. Prediction is all very well; but we must make sense of what we predict.
Obituaries in the USC News and NYT offer further background, as does Wikipedia.
