At the new books shelves of my friendly local public library I recently found the 2024 book by Robin Reames titled The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself: The power of rhetoric in polarized times. I have been skimming through it. Titles for five of her six chapters include classical names. They are followed by a Conclusion chapter and a detailed educational one on How to Think Rhetorically. In my previous post on June 8, 2024, I blogged about how The Pentad from Kenneth Burke is a rhetorical tool for sorting out stories people tell.
Her Chapter 4 is titled Deep Ideology: What’s Buried in Alcibiades’s Words. Starting with a paragraph at the bottom of page 139 she says:
“The fact that we don’t much use formal logical methods when we make arguments doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re being illogical. It just means that our arguments don’t come in strictly logical packaging. Quite often they come in quasi-logical packaging. There is often a hidden quasi-logical structure to the arguments that people make every day, or so the twentieth-century logician Stephen Toulmin, an important figure in the New Rhetoric movement, believed. The Uses of Argument by Toulmin was one of several books published in 1958 by New Rhetoric thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Kenneth Burke, Chaim Perelman, and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. In that postwar era, these thinkers were determined to redouble their efforts in recovering reasoned debate, speech, persuasion, and argumentation. Toulmin developed his model of argumentation, now known as the Toulmin scheme, to expose the common underlying structure of everyday arguments.
In many ways, Toulmin was simply trying to bring the study of logic back to its Aristotelian roots, since Aristotle himself aimed to provide a method that could expose how actual reasoning occurs. Like Aristotle in postwar Athens and other luminaries of the New Rhetoric in postwar Europe and America, Toulmin didn’t want logic to be a merely academic activity, cut off from the real work of human argumentation and understanding. Instead, he wanted to show how people make actual arguments in everyday discourse, and how understanding this might raise the bar of rational discussion. In everyday arguments, people respond to perceived problems and make claims about what ought to happen, guided by a sense of what is possible. They defend their claims against challengers, both real and hypothetical.”
There is an article at Purdue University’s Purdue Online Writing Lab [OWL] titled Toulmin Argument which succinctly explains:
“Developed by philosopher Stephen E. Toulmin, the Toulmin method is a style of argumentation that breaks arguments down into six component parts: claim, grounds, warrant, qualifier, rebuttal, and backing. In Toulmin’s method, every argument begins with three fundamental parts: the claim, the grounds, and the warrant.
A claim is the assertion that authors would like to prove to their audience. It is, in other words, the main argument.
The grounds [data] of an argument are the evidence and facts that help support the claim.
Finally, the warrant, which is either implied or stated explicitly, is the assumption that links the grounds to the claim. ….
Backing refers to any additional support of the warrant. In many cases, the warrant is implied, and therefore the backing provides support for the warrant by giving a specific example that justifies the warrant.
The qualifier shows that a claim may not be true in all circumstances. Words like ‘presumably,’ ‘some,’ and ‘many’ help your audience understand that you know there are instances where your claim may not be correct.
The rebuttal is an acknowledgement of another valid view of the situation.”
In her educational chapter on How to Think Rhetorically Robin has a section starting on page 245 titled Let’s Think Rhetorically: The Toulmin Scheme. A simple, graphical Harry Potter example is shown above.
Her discussion starting in the first new paragraph on page 248 says:
“You can think more rhetorically using the Toulmin scheme by choosing any argument from a public debate that interests you and breaking it down into Toulmin’s five [sic] components. And you can even use the blank template on the following page as a guide). The following questions will get you started. Once you get going, the process can be eye-opening.
Start with the data. Why? It’s typically the easiest to spot People rarely advance a claim without citing some statistic, fact, figure, or concrete reality.
Ask yourself, What claim is this data supporting?
Identify the backing. What basic rule, law, principle, or precept is the warrant based on? You can sometimes get at the backing by asking what field that type of argument would be found in (law, science, aesthetics, etc.).
Look for qualifiers and rebuttals. Or imagine what kinds of qualifiers and rebuttals would be appropriate, given the relationship between the backing and the claim. If a person makes an unqualified argument, or if he can see no case where his argument does not apply, then this can show us why it feels as though there is no room for discussion.”
There is a very detailed 2024 CSU Writing Guide by Laurel Nesbit titled Using the Toulmin Method which you can download as a thirty-page pdf.
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