At one point in the book, Toulmin claims that analytic arguments are the "only sort of arguments which will answer the demands of certainty made in epistemological speculation." Scott argues, however, that every argument/syllogism involves a shift in time and, in many cases, a shift in place. Humans may attempt to create a set of universal values, in doing so they will "enter into the contingencies of time and place and will not give rise to products which are certain." Instead, truth must be constructed through cooperative critical inquiry, a term/idea that can be inferred from Toulmin, although Scott argues that Toulmin doesn't seem to grasp the implications of this fully.
Scott's discussion of Ehninger and Brockriede's book Decision by Debate briefly mentions that the book adapts Toulmin's form of argumentation into a neat and orderly speech model and ignores the philosophical issues Toulmin attached to that form. As I HS speech teacher I taught from a text that used this model in a similar way. The text broke down Toulmin into an easily remembered flowchart, like this one: Toulmin's Model of Argumentation. In fact, several other concepts (such as audience analysis, rhetorical constraints, ethos) were treated this same way--stripped of any context and repackaged into a set of objective terms. Unfortunately, many HS textbooks portray public speaking (and writing, and literature, and . . .) similarly.
On one hand, I can understand the desire to make concepts easily digestible for the students. However, by basing HS textbooks on this skeletal framework of disembodied concepts, we do students a great disservice. (And this isn't even taking into account the whole of our broken education system.) A few reasons for this trend immediately come to mind, although I recognize that these ideas in no way address the entirety of the issue nor do I presume they are original to me.
The first reason that comes to mind is a lack of faith in our students. Perhaps we feel that presenting HS students with concepts that are not conflicting or not clearly defined will confuse them. When eventually presented with sticky concepts, many students do feel overwhelmed, simply because their prior education excluded them from negotiating these types of issues. A second reason is fear--educators/administrations fear that by opening up the classroom to this cooperative critical inquiry we will lose control of the classroom. The roles of "teacher" and "student" may even (gasp!) be threatened. The final reason is a desire to absolve ourselves of ethical responsibility. In teaching an "objectively true" set of prescribed academic standards, we say, "It is not I who am responsible."
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