Stephen Edelston Toulmin Quotes

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The picture of the natural world we all take for granted today, has one remarkable feature, which cannot be ignored in any study of the ancestry of science: it is a historical picture.

Stephen Edelston Toulmin

Prediction is all very well; but we must make sense of what we predict. The mainspring of science is the conviction that by honest, imaginative enquiry we can build up a system of ideas about Nature which has some legitimate claim to 'reality'.

Stephen Edelston Toulmin

Certainly, every statement in a science should conceivably be capable of being called in question, and of being shown empirically to be unjustified; for only so can the science be saved from dogmatism.

Stephen Edelston Toulmin

It is part of the art of the sciences, which has to be picked up in the course of the scientist's training, to recognize the situations in which any particular theory or principle can be applied to, and when it will cease to hold.

Stephen Edelston Toulmin

Natural historians... look for regularities of given forms, but physicists seek the form of given regularities.

Stephen Edelston Toulmin

No doubt, a scientist isn't necessarily penalized for being a complex, versatile, eccentric individual with lots of extra-scientific interests. But it certainly doesn't help him a bit.

Stephen Edelston Toulmin

Stephen Edelston Toulmin

Stephen Edelston Toulmin

Born: March 25, 1922

Died: December 4, 2009 (aged 87)

Bio: Stephen Edelston Toulmin was a British philosopher, author, and educator. Influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Toulmin devoted his works to the analysis of moral reasoning.

Known for:

The uses of argument (1952)
Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (1990)
The discovery of time (1965)
Return to Reason (2001)
The architecture of matter (1962)

Stephen Edelston Toulmin on Wikipedia

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