Philosophy - yes!

It is a pleasure to be reading philosophy again! Last year, when I was taking Philosophy of Language (Phil 7100) with Dr. Claire Horisk (who is *wonderful* by the way), we spent the semester considering the kind of logical issues that Toulmin references. How is it that we use language to refer? To make logical connections? To build arguments? The whole project of philosophy, at least analytical philosophy since Kant, has been to lay out a kind of epistemological logic that allows us to make truth claims about the universe. Although Rorty critiqued that project in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (I did a book report on that for Comm Theory last year), and Toulmin challenges the universality of logical norms in the book we are reading, there has been strong resistance to such rethinking. I loved the introductory note where Toulmin likened his book to a child that had made new friends – in this case, communication scholars – when the philosophical community responded negatively to his work.

(As a side note – had an “aha” moment reading Toulmin regarding my bibliographic network: I had forgotten about/not considered my entire training in philosophy, especially philosophy of language. Yes, I do have background in building philosophical arguments! More on that (soon) on my personal blog.)

The question that Toulmin is exploring - whether syllogistic logic can be applied across arguments, or whether there needs to be more of what I might call an organic approach – is actually, I believe, analogous to the kind of struggles we have in communication scholarship between, broadly speaking, the social scientific and qualitative/rhetorical approaches. There is something very appealing about being able to quantify and lay out the logic in our scholarship and research. And, I must admit, I *love* the whole philosophical project of pulling language apart to see what it is really doing/saying. But if that is not how people conceive of communication (or, in the case of our course topic: argumentation), there may be limits to the usefulness of a narrow, logical approach. I’m not ready to chuck it out the window though. At least in terms of philosophy of language, it is too much fun! (if any of you wants to see what we studied in Phil 7100, I would be glad to share the course syllabus, and my summary sheet of the content we covered)