As I started reading Toulmin I was thankful to not only my friends who located it online but also those who were generous enough to make the book available free of cost. Although I was vaguely questioning myself why they would make such a celebrated book free, I could not imagine that I was reading just a preview.
So, it has turned out that I have to be content with whatever is available as preview on Qestia and Amazon. Feel very sorry. But luckily, Amazon allows reading quite a few pages. However, I’m feeling that I’ll be missing a lot, and based on what I have found in Toulmin so far, I strongly believe that I will need to get the book and read it thoroughly. As my wrong order lies on my table waiting to be returned, I can only wish I were a little more careful before ordering the book.
Anyway, I’ve found a very interesting section in Toumin, and I wish to talk a little about that here. In the introduction of the book Toulmin says that the third chapter makes his real argument, his real contribution to the field. And I was glad to find a few pages of the chapter on Amazon. The very opening of the chapter, attracted my attention that he compares an argument with an organism. He says, “An argument is like an organism,” with an anatomical structure and a physiological structure. It’s interesting to see an argument as an organic structure having discrete parts functioning at various levels. Toulmin contends the we can see such an structure at its finest at the sentence level. Hence, logicians discuss at the sentence level. He further writes, “The time has come to change the focus of our inquiry, and to concentrate on this finer level.” Really?
I’m left with more questions than answers about how an argument might be understood at this physiological level. Toulmin says it is the micro-level arguments that contribute to its organism, although these micro-arguments have to be understood in relation to macro-arguments. I think the need to look at that relationship is not hard to understand, at least based on our simplistic definition/ understanding of an argument, but the idea of understanding an argument at the physiological level sounds really noble and interesting to me, although the book was published half a century ago.
This idea of the sentence level argument is reminding me of Stanley Fish’s emphasis on sentence, and his book called How to Write a Sentence. A book called How to Write a Sentence by a renowned scholar! When I heard the title I could just be surprised. Although I haven’t read the book, it seems he has very magnificently shown how a sentence speaks about our writing (also argument?). (There’s a review of the book in today’s Inside Higher Ed: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee_on_new_stanley_fish_book)
I was tempted to read a few pages of the book (in Amazon preview, again!) having read the review, and it was interesting to see how Fish talks about the sentence as the most important level in terms of the effectiveness of writing. In that sense, an argument exists at the level of the sentence, although Fish talks from the perspective of affect rather than argument and persuasion.
So, do Toulmin’s physiology of an argument and Fish’s sentence work similarly? Just curious. 
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