Critical Thinking

Center for Critical Thinking (no date). Available: http://www.criticalthinking.org/
Thoms, Karen Jarrett & Najmi Junaid. Developing Critical Thinking Skills in a Technology-Related Class (no date).    Available: http://www.mtsu.edu/~itconf/proceed97/thinking.html
Raths, Louis E., Selma Wassermann, Arthur Jonas, & Arnold Rothstein. Teaching for Thinking: Theory, Strategies, &   Activities for the Classroom. 2nd edition. New York:  Teachers College Press (Columbia University), 1986.  [This book available at CTL.].

Steven Toulmin, A Resource for Teaching Critical Thinking
by Joe Glaser, English

 

Stephen Toulmin, born 1922, studied mathematics and physics at Cambridge and, perhaps oddly, became interested in human rationality during WWII.  His most important book, The Uses of Argument, takes aim at classical logic modeled on the cool precision of mathematics.  Truth in the real world, says Toulmin, is more often fuzzy, based on probability, experience, and culturally conditioned suppositions.  Toulmin appeals to conceptual psychologists, cultural anthropologists, sociologists of knowledge, and, in a humbler fashion, specialists in speech and writing.  He has much to offer teachers of critical thinking, an area we all salute—though usually from a safe distance.

Forget Aristotelian formulas, says Toulmin in essence.  Any argument can be reduced to three elements, which may be stated or merely implied.  Every argument must stake a claim.  Every argument must rest on evidence.  (If there's no evidence, there's no argument, just a claim.)  And every argument must offer a warrant—some guarantee that the evidence does indeed justify the claim (1).   This basic model is as simple and sturdy as a three-legged stool.  Claim, evidence, warrant: if you know these you can analyze other people's arguments or do justice to your own.  If you don't, you can't.

Take the oldest logical chestnut under the tree.  Claim:  Socrates is mortal.  Evidence: Socrates is a man.  Warrant: All men are mortal.  Classifying this as a deductive argument and appealing to the arcana of syllogisms misses the point, says Toulmin, by implying the form of the argument is somehow more important than its truth.  Is Socrates a man?  Are all men mortals?  That's what's important, not major and minor premises.

Besides confusing students, emphasizing form leads to a wrongheaded view of truth, he says.  There are no perfect arguments, even in the airy realm of deduction.  How do you know all men are mortal?  You can't remember one who wasn't.  How do you know Socrates is a man?  Peek under his himation, I suppose.  Either way, you must consult experience, and either way your experience may be wrong.  There is no certainty outside closed systems like mathematics.  Accordingly, Toulmin-style arguments leave lots of room for “probably,” “perhaps,” “I guess,” and other qualifiers.

Toulmin's model works as well for inductive as for deductive arguments.  From 1979 to 1987, says a New York Times articles in one of my textbooks, 57,000 women a year complained of being assaulted by their husbands, while 210,000 a year reported assaults by their ex-husbands.  This proves, says the article, that women are safer from abuse in stable marriages.  Claim: Women are safer from abuse in stable marriages.  Evidence: The Times statistics.  Warrant: Those statistics justify that claim.

Toulmin's model demystifies thinking by dragging its structure out so you can examine its unspoken purposes and assumptions.  Students armed with Toulmin can examine their own beliefs systematically without getting unduly involved with its form.  Each belief is a claim they value.  Each is based or not based on evidence.  The evidence may or may not warrant the claim.  Looking at things this way detoxifies emotional issues and helps students get a grip on pragmatic ones.  Their government papers will be more persuasive if they can isolate and examine the steps in their own thinking or in the theory they're critiquing.  On the personal side, they may still choose to believe god will burn you in hell for playing bingo, but they'll have to admit the evidence for this is scanty enough to be reasonably ignored by the woman with the eyeshade filling in eight cards.

The Toulmin approach strips arguments down to the essentials—not always easy in a world where all the parts of an argument are rarely stated in so many words.  Look again at the New York Times argument.  Even if the statistics are accurate, what do they really prove?  Could women in stable marriages be less eager than divorced women to report abuse?  Mightn't a few ex-wives report abuse where there isn't any?  How would these possibilities skew the paper's conclusion?  Can you know without more research?

Besides, aren't there other claims involved in that argument?  Saying women are less likely to be abused in stable marriages than when they're divorced is like saying they're less likely to be burnt if their houses are not on fire—if that's all you mean.  But doesn't the paper want us to think that marriage of itself causes relative safety from abuse?   Its wording nudges us in that direction.  Real Claim: Marriage is an intrinsically safe, desirable state.  Evidence: 57,000 married women get beat up each year.  Warrant: only 57,000 documented cases of spouse abuse a year means that married women are safe.  Whoa! You could use the same statistics to argue with equal logic that more women would do well to walk out of their marriages.

Toulmin has a lot more to say about thinking than I'm qualified to discuss, but his deceptively simple basic model is a great tool for teachers and students alike to strip arguments to their bones and test their strength.  If you want to build critical thinking into a course, there's no better way than to introduce Toulmin's model early and keep coming back to it until it becomes second nature for the students.  When they start demanding evidence and warrants for what you say, you'll know you've succeeded.

(1)Warrants isolate the steps in thinking most useful to examine and least likely to be stated.  Toulmin is a qualified nominalist—that is, he thinks most effective warrants appeal to standards respected by certain cultures and subcultures.  That's why an argument that holds up perfectly well in an economics class may be viewed with disdain in an ethics course or considered irrelevant in science.  Much of the acculturation function of education is teaching students what warrants carry weight with what groups.

Sources:

Because Toulmin's logic is so useful in the classroom, there's an abundance of practical and theoretical information about him on the Internet.

(The following URL's were collected by CTL staff.  They were operational at press time. Inclusion here indicates no endorsement of the material other than for illustration purposes.)

http://www.unl.edu/speech/comm109/Toulmin/index.htm
Toulmin Project Home Page, created by Charles Soukup and Scott Titsworth, Department of Communication Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

http://rjohara.uncg.edu/darwin/files/biblio.toulmin
(A bibliography compiled  by Robert J. O'Hara and Patricia C. Dew, Center for Critical Inquiry in the Liberal Arts and Department of Biology, University of North Carolina at Greensboro.)

http://www.wright.edu/~chall/toulmin.htm
(Toulmin's system explained for a writing class assignment with illustrations.)

http://www.wam.umd.edu/~gaines/toulmin.html
(An illustration of the system as used in a communications class.)
 
 

Or look for

Foss, Sonja K., Karen A. Foss, and Robert Trapp, eds. Contemporary Perspectives on
Rhetoric. 2nd ed. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1991.

Check out these volumes:
Volume 1 -- Clear Goals
Volume 2 -- Adequate Preparation
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