Abstract
Stephen Toulmin’s discussion of historical change in science makes use of a number of dichotomies that have become increasingly popular in the decade since the appearance of Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. One of these, that between ‘logicality’ and ‘rationality’, he sharpens more perhaps than anyone else has done, with far-reaching consequences not only for the historical sociology of science but also for the philosophy of science and for the general theory of man as a knowing being. If he is right, not only have most people been looking in the wrong direction in their attempt to circumscribe and understand the structures of human rationality, but it is not even clear that it has any structures, of the kind they were looking for, at least.
Comments on S. Toulmin, ‘Scientific Strategies and Historical Change’, AAAS Symposium on Comaparative History and Sociology of Science, Boston, December 1969.
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Notes
op. cit., References to Professor Toulmin’s paper wil be by section number. The remainder of the footnotes below were added in proof (1973)
In the Postscript to the new edition of SSR, Kuhn appears to rejects it (pp. 199, 250–6)
Kuhn rejects it, or at least is distrustful of this sort analogy, op. cit., pp 208–9
See, for example, the discussion after Feyerabend’s paper in Minnesota Studies in the Philosopy of Science, Vol. IV(ed. By M. Radner and S. Winokur ), Minneapolis 1970
The rejection of the foundationalist of induction and confirmation at one time backed by logical positivism, but not (it now seems to me ) so as to constitute a quite new sort of argument against it.
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© 1974 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland
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McMullin, E. (1974). Logicality and Rationality: A Comment on Toulmin’s Theory of Science. In: Seeger, R.J., Cohen, R.S. (eds) Philosophical Foundations of Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 11. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2126-5_24
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