Rhetoric, dialectics or pragmatics: Stephen Toulmin's The Uses of Argument 50 years later.

Abstract

Stephen Toulmin published The Uses of Argument in 1958, a book dedicated to discussing the epistemological dimension of behavioral sciences, such as psychology, anthropology, and sociology, by means of an analytical overview in which the argumentative and linguistic realms are the main ones. Fifty years after its publication there is no consensus amongst argumentation scholars and discourse analysts regarding the core emphasis of this text that, besides Chäim Perelman’s work, opened the door to the contemporary studies of argumentative discourse. In this paper the three principal angles from which this book has been mainly analyzed are discussed: rhetoric, dialectics, and pragmatics. By making a constant parallel between Toulmin’s texts and the distinctions of contemporary critics, this paper dismisses the idea that this book has a rhetorical face, that the book contains enough evidence to define it as dialectical and undermines the opinion which invites reading Toulmin’s book in a complete pragmatic sense.