“Logical-looking answers to psychological-looking questions”!

The term “epistemology” attracted my attention in the last chapter in the Toulmin book. But I found his discussion so complex that I’m not sure if I can make any concrete sense of this discussion of logical-looking answers to psychological-looking questions. Even then, I am tempted by how he discusses argument in relation to epistemology – “the theory of knowledge.”

Is knowledge construction a cognitive process or a mathematical process based on logical steps? Or can they be the same?

What I found very interesting in Toulmin, so far I could understand, or rather I thought I understood, is that he does not see them as entirely separable. His example is really revealing: “A child doing a sum, a counsel presenting a case, an astronomer predicting an eclipse, all their activities can be looked at either psychologically, as involving ‘cognitive processes,’ or instead critically, as involving the employment or misemployment of rational procedures” (196). So, on the one hand we seem to be working “cognitively” but on the other, logical (mathematical) calculations are influencing our ‘psychological’ perceptions. In this sense, when we know something, if it is possible at all to say so, we know it collectively – psychologically and logically.

It led me to think about how the body and the mind are bound to function in unison. As we were doing rhetoric and the body last year, we were talking a lot about how the mind is a part of the body, and how their functions are inseparable. On the surface, we seem to be employing one or the other faculty to do something, but in fact we are working as one.

Is that the way Toulmin is looking at logical and psychological methods of understanding something? He writes, “Rational produces and methods do not exist in the air, apart from the actual reasoners [can we equate it to the body?]; they are things which are learned, employed, sometimes modified, on occasion even abandoned, by the people doing the reasoning, and to this extent, the field of logic is inevitably open on one side to the field of psychology. On the other hand, psychologists cannot afford to talk as though ‘cognitive processes’ were purely natural phenomena, which spring into existence in individual human beings or reasons known only to known only to God (or natural selection) and which can accordingly be studied in a purely empirical, a posteriori manner” (196).

I think it makes a very good connection to the mind-body discussion.