On Toulmin

I found it interesting that Toulmin’s book wasn’t widely used or even accepted until it was presented in the United States. Beyond that, it appears that what Toulmin had originally intended it for—philosophy ("to relate traditional philosophical paradoxes…to…contrast…aspects of reasoning and argument")—was rather embraced by a different group of academia: scholars of rhetoric.

In his book he categorizes two types of arguments: "substantial" and "analytic." These two approaches to rhetoric seem to be rooted in earlier works by Plato and Aristotle and distinguish arguments as being either "practical" or "theoretical."

I learned in another class last semester how to develop an argument from the basis of an enthymeme’s construct. Is this similar to the syllogism approach? Toulmin makes the claim that arguments cannot be pursued theoretically or analytically because practical affairs are "too complex to yield to a single universal principle." Rather, Toulmin lays out an argument on the basis of three primary elements (warrant, grounds, claim) which went on to serve as a model for individuals to construct and communicate arguments.