Return to Reason

Stephen Toulmin9780674004955, 0-674-00495-7, 0-674-01235-6

The turmoil and brutality of the twentieth century have made it increasingly difficult to maintain faith in the ability of reason to fashion a stable and peaceful world. After the ravages of global conflict and a Cold War that divided the world’s loyalties, how are we to master our doubts and face the twenty-first century with hope?

In Return to Reason , Stephen Toulmin argues that the potential for reason to improve our lives has been hampered by a serious imbalance in our pursuit of knowledge. The centuries-old dominance of rationality, a mathematical mode of reasoning modeled on theory and universal certainties, has diminished the value of reasonableness, a system of humane judgments based on personal experience and practice. To this day, academic disciplines such as economics and professions such as law and medicine often value expert knowledge and abstract models above the testimony of diverse cultures and the practical experience of individuals.

Now, at the beginning of a new century, Toulmin sums up a lifetime of distinguished work and issues a powerful call to redress the balance between rationality and reasonableness. His vision does not reject the valuable fruits of science and technology, but requires awareness of the human consequences of our discoveries. Toulmin argues for the need to confront the challenge of an uncertain and unpredictable world, not with inflexible ideologies and abstract theories, but by returning to a more humane and compassionate form of reason, one that accepts the diversity and complexity that is human nature as an essential beginning for all intellectual inquiry.
(20010816)

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Table of contents :
Title Page……Page 3
Contents……Page 5
Preface……Page 7
1 / Introduction: Rationality and Certainty……Page 13
2 / How Reason Lost Its Balance……Page 26
3 / The Invention of Disciplines……Page 41
4 / Economics, or the Physics That Never Was……Page 59
5 / The Dreams of Rationalism……Page 79
6 / Rethinking Method……Page 95
7 / Practical Reason and the Clinical Arts……Page 114
8 / Ethical Theory and Moral Practice……Page 135
9 / The Trouble with Disciplines……Page 150
10 / Redressing the Balance……Page 167
11 / The Varieties of Experience……Page 187
12 / The World of Where and When……Page 202
13 / Postscript: Living with Uncertainty……Page 216
Notes……Page 227
Index……Page 251