Title | : | Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts |
Author | : | |
Rating | : | |
ISBN | : | 0691019967 |
ISBN-10 | : | 9780691019963 |
Language | : | English |
Format Type | : | Paperback |
Number of Pages | : | 520 |
Publication | : | First published January 1, 1972 |
Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts Reviews
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note to self: [from wikipedia article about Toulmin:] Toulmin suggests that anthropologists have been tempted to side with relativists because they have noticed the influence of cultural variations on rational arguments; in other words, the anthropologist or relativist overemphasizes the importance of the “field-dependent” aspect of arguments, and becomes unaware of the “field-invariant” elements. In an attempt to provide solutions to the problems of absolutism and relativism, Toulmin attempts throughout his work to develop standards that are neither absolutist nor relativist for assessing the worth of ideas.
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I first read this work while I lived in Oregon during the mid 70s though I don't remember precisely when I did read it. I might have read it later in New Orleans during the late 70s. It was my first encounter with Toulmin who immediately impressed me. I did not quite grasp what he meant except that what certain English explorers intended to learn prompted them during an expedition to the South Pacific to learn about an astronomical event became less important in its effect on European culture than their original aim.
They encountered a different culture in the islands that caused them as well as people home in Europe to think differently about their European culture. Europeans came wisely or unwisely, accurately or inaccurately, to wonder if the style or basis of their society might change to something like that in the South Pacific seas. That was the initial relativist effect.
Toulmin writes about interplay between philosophical appraisal and anthropological studies but with details about the history of the expedition. His style of writing actually illustrates the relationship and a fundamental problem
His combination of historical details with intellectual analysis of how intellectual structures play against anthropological observation intrigued and challenged me.This intrigued me.
However, I was not quite certain what was at stake. I suspect Toulmin changed his thinking in the process of writhing this book. He took ideas to be important factors is shaping historical events. It was sort of a forecast of Jonathan Israel's work.
To say ideas are culturally shaped is not quite the same as saying they are essentially relativistic but ideas bloom within cultural systems or matrices. Cultures have choices of a sort in what fundamental ideas shape them. Later Toulmin changed how he wrote his books. But I see the formation of those newer works in this early one. A followup is his book "Cosmopolis" which, I think makes this earlier work more understandable. In other words not only material facts determine history but how we think about everything in life shapes it as well.
As you can see I am still struggling with this fine work -
As a college sophomore I was intrigued with epistemology—how we think and come to know things—and this book’s title, subtitle (The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts), publication date (1972), and imprimatur (Princeton University Press) was sufficient to convince me I’d found myself a solid contemporary philosophical account of epistemological concerns. While this book has somehow remained with me and eluded a number of moves and book cullings over the past 45 years, I only read at the time of purchase the general introduction, which I’d since long forgotten.
I returned to Toulmin’s book at this time because of the political swell of know-nothingism in the last five years, beginning with the Brexit vote in England, the yellow vest movement in France, and Trump’s “base” in the United States. At this moment, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, the same swaggering know-nothingism in the United States disparages medical experts and readily accedes to the assurances of a president who best handles a national crisis by trying to underreport its severity. Fact-checking the president’s speeches over his four-year term reveals a man whose veracity is never more than 50%, but that did not deter the 74 million Americans who voted to re-elect him in the 2020 elections. Magical thinking appears to have replaced rational analysis, and the huckster-in-chief preys on and panders to the credulous.
But… Toulmin tells a different story, interesting, but far from my initial expectations of what his book’s title suggested to me, and far from offering any explanation for magical thinking and know-nothingism. Toulmin is interested in illuminating the process by which concepts are generated and by what means they come to be accepted. And, from the beginning, he makes it clear that even the term “concept” is slippery, since it is more than an idea, and it embodies inchoate abstractions as well as articulated theories. There’s not much discussion of this, and there’s some latitude in the way “concept” is used, though primarily it refers to the rationally defensible ideas or theories embodied in the sciences.
In a long discussion of relative and absolute (diachronic and synchronic) truths, Toulmin ends up plunking down somewhere in the middle, with what appears to be a pragmatic or utilitarian explanation of how concepts are tested, proven useful (rather than absolutely true), and ramify or are modified as empirical problems necessitate. The long-held model for scientific/conceptual truth in Western thinking was Euclid’s geometry, a system of thought that appeared systematic and rigidly irrefutable. This model dovetailed or inspired the Platonic conception of eternal forms, a notion (along with God) that served as the basis for a Rationalist epistemology. Locke and Hume countered with sense impressions and an Empirical epistemology. An interesting aspect of this discussion is Toulmin’s analysis of Thomas Kuhn’s “Copernican Revolution” thesis, which ends up reducing Kuhn’s mountain to a molehill—not a revolution but simply an instance of conceptual evolution.
Using the term evolution then presents Toulmin occasion to discuss the absence of any teleological end/purpose to the growth/evolution of concepts through time. There is no ideal end/purpose to the truth of a concept, since its acceptance at any time is its utility in addressing imminent problems or those at hand.
What is most salient in this discussion is the fact that concepts are shared, that they develop within a discipline where all participants are willing/able to systematically evaluate a concept’s merits. The rigor of such disciplinary cooperation will breed some contention, which can further validate a concept or lead to other, more fruitful concepts. Toulmin alludes to the imagery of a monastic order in describing any particular scientific discipline, as it entails a single-minded dedication to the intellectual goals of that discipline. Other types of disciplines—law, arts, trades, etc.—are given some space, and Toulmin observes that these disciplines evolve and use concepts differently because theirs are more real-world/practical goals.
To return to the concerns I addressed at the outset: Toulmin’s thesis about shared use and development of concepts within disciplines skirts the problem of these concepts being respected outside their disciplines. To people ignorant of the rigor that defines any scientific discipline, it is a simple matter to dismiss truths and implications of that discipline’s concepts, if some other alternative (always untenable) is considered in the short term more desirable. This suggests to me that there may be further contemporary difficulties with alternative truths, if our populace is so ill-educated that when faced with a conman it relies for validation not on logic, but, instead, on the emotions his rhetorical flourishes inspire…