For special issue of Argumentation / Bart Verheij, ed. A Citation-Based Reflection on Toulmin and Argument Intellectual history has always appealed to certain kinds of scholars. The prospect of being vindicated by future thinkers can compensate for the difficult struggle that many original thinkers experience when they take risks, attempt fundamental change, or simply have difficulty communicating their ideas to contemporaries. Especially in today's intellectual din, where the fast pace of technology and science and the rise of new disciplines can make it hard to hear traditional voices, where scholars are under pressure to produce short-term and conventionally valuable thoughts, there is merit in what the intellecual historian does. The new tool in intellectual history is the citation count. Today, there are numerous ways to gauge the impact of a publication because there are numerous citation databases that are maintained, both by professional organizations and by companies in the business of providing high quality indexes. Online databases make comparative study possible across an entire discipline. For Stephen Toulmin, intellectual history is a relevant question. Toulmin is known widely as a seminal author, is appreciated in many disparate intellectual communities, and continues to grow in stature. By all accounts, Stephen Edelston Toulmin has done things in an academic career that only few will do. He stands as an important twentieth century thinker, whether one thinks he is a logician, a philosopher of science, a rhetorician, a popular writer, or even an intellectual historian himself. His work reaches the most improbable corners of the academic landscape. I have been approached by many people wanting to discuss the Toulmin diagram, by scholars from every continent, for dozens of purposes, whether they use the diagram formally or informally, whether they are technologists or Luddites, whether they know a lot about Stephen Toulmin or nothing at all. Meanwhile, the depth of Toulmin's work has always been under suspicion, its technical importance questionable; and one can even quarrel whether there are precedents for his views. Toulmin is one of the scholars most in need of objective standards for placement in intellectual history. So how well is Toulmin cited? Which of Toulmin's works is the most cited? Which work has had the most impact? Of course the last two questions are not the same. "Wittgenstein's Vienna" by Allan Janik and Toulmin, which I have never personally seen cited, has had more impact on me personally than "Uses of Argument," which my research community cites regularly. Still, we can measure the citation counts, and the relation between impact and citation count is tangible. In "Origins of Genius," Dean Keith Simonton goes so far as to equate genius with achievement (a dubious move which I do not endorse) and to assert that citation is the best contemporary measure of the latter (a claim I find more agreeable). Readers of this journal would probably be surprised if it were not the case that "Uses of Argument" were Toulmin's most cited work. In fact, it is. But the surprise is just how close is the count. The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) numbers, in Summer 2005, ignoring unusual citation forms such as foreign language variations of titles, are as follows: 776 USES OF ARGUMENT 668 HUMAN UNDERSTANDING 344 COSMOPOLIS 266 FORESIGHT AND UNDERSTANDING 182 INTRODUCTION TO REASONING 158 PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE 122 RETURN TO COSMOLOGY This means that of the millions of journal articles that have appeared in the past decade and a half, in the leading journals in humanities, social sciences, and science and technology, 776 distinct articles cited Toulmin's "Uses of Argument" in some form or another. The database begins in 1988, so one may calculate that nearly four dozen journal articles per year cited "Uses of Argument." This number needs to be given some meaning. But first, it is worth remarking on the distribution. It is unusual today even for a philosopher to have lead publications that are all books. This is consistent with our understanding of Toulmin as that special kind of academic who can make a career on a few deeply considered and generously crafted publications. He is clearly an academic of a purer time, when writing was a valued part of authorship. In short, Toulmin wrote books, not articles, and there are few pure academics who can afford that luxury today. That pattern is only observed today among very popular authors, for example, Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter. It is unusual for such authors to have ideas that are precise enough to be useful to technical authors in a discipline who are writing journal papers, and even more unusual for the pattern of citation to identify a particular idea. Toulmin's argument diagrams are unusual in this respect. Second, the rate at which "Uses of Argument" is being cited is growing. If one looks at the citations by year, with a two-year sum to smooth the year-to-year variations, it seems clear that Toulmin's book is becoming more popular. In fact, at the time of this writing, the half-year citation count for 2005 is 30, which is on pace to be the best year for the book (60 cites projected for 2005). Toulmin's Uses of Argument year 2-year 2004 47 100 2003 53 92 2002 39 73 2001 34 63 2000 29 55 1999 26 53 1998 27 61 1997 34 69 1996 35 67 1995 32 70 1994 38 72 1993 34 55 1992 21 52 1991 31 50 1990 19 35 1989 16 38 1988 21 It is true that the number of journal articles indexed each year is growing, so one may expect growth in citations for a publication which is actually remaining constant in notoriety. But compare, for example, Chaim Perelman's "New Rhetoric," which seems to be falling in yearly citations, at least among English language authors. Perelman's New Rhetoric year 2-year 2004 25 52 2003 17 38 2002 21 44 2001 23 50 2000 27 45 1999 18 46 1998 28 49 1997 21 54 1996 33 71 1995 38 58 1994 20 45 1993 25 50 1992 25 50 1991 25 47 1990 22 66 1989 44 78 1988 34 Perhaps it is not new to point out that S. E. Toulmin has been a special intellectual whose recognition is growing. How big has he been, and how big is he now? If we compare Toulmin to other philosophical logicians and philosophers of science, Toulmin's numbers shine. Counting any journal article published in 2004 that cites some work of an author, Toulmin fares well on the following list of related and celebrated authors: Year 2004 journal citations for all works 1. 870 l zadeh 2. 543 t kuhn 3. 271 w quine 4. 262 h putnam 5. 224 j austin 6. 182 s kripke 7. 139 a tarski 8. 130 s toulmin 9. 123 a whitehead 10. 113 j girard 11. 112 j barwise 12. 112 i lakatos 13. 111 m bunge 14. 107 r carnap 15. 99 c hempel 16. 95 h reichenbach 17. 94 n rescher 18. 88 p gardenfors 19. 87 r stalnaker 20. 80 j hintikka 21. 79 p feyerabend 22. 79 n cartwright 23. 77 p suppes 24. 72 a ayer 25. 61 g vonwright 26. 58 m fitting 27. 56 s kleene 28. 50 a church 29. 47 p geach 30. 47 i levi One can argue about who ought to be on such a list. It is hard to decide which works of Popper, Russell, or Chomsky to include, for example, and which to exclude. Similarly, should Foucault or Polanyi be included? Turing or Wittgenstein? The list of excluded names that would challenge for the top of the list is probably quite small. In any case, it should be satisfying to those who admire Toulmin's work to see Toulmin so high on such a list. Toulmin appears solidly ahead of many of the great names in philosophy of logic and philosophy of science. If we rank each author by the total number of citations (1988-2004), for the most popular work of the author (counting only the most common citation forms seen in 2004), then Toulmin does just as well: Total journal citations best cited work, ISI abbreviated title 1. 12364 t kuhn, structure science 2. 6085 l zadeh, inform contr 3. 2197 i lakatos, criticism growth kno 4. 1975 j austin, how do things words 5. 1853 w quine, word object 6. 863 h putnam, reason truth hist 7. 854 c hempel, aspects of sci expl 8. 851 p feyerabend, against method 9. 669 s toulmin, uses of argument 10. 640 s kleene, intro metamath 11. 636 j girard, theoretical computer 12. 540 a whitehead, sci modern world 13. 477 j barwise, situations attitudes 14. 463 s kripke, naming necessity 15. 432 a tarski, pac j math 16. 407 j hintikka, knowledge belief 17. 404 h reichenbach, elements symbolic lo 18. 390 p gardenfors, knowledge flux 19. 366 g vonwright, explanation understa 20. 362 m bunge, treatise basic phil 21. 300 n cartwright, how laws physics lie 22. 287 p martinlof, inform control 23. 276 c alchourron, j symbolic logic 24. 251 p suppes, probabilistic theory 25. 248 i levi, enterprise knowledge 26. 244 n rescher, many valued logic 27. 236 a church, j symbolic logic 28. 231 r carnap, meaning necessity 29. 215 a ayer, language truth logic 30. 198 b chellas, modal logic intro Perhaps few would anticipate that Toulmin has been larger than Carnap, Church, Tarski, and Russell-Whitehead, in the past decade and a half. In fact, after a handful of colossal ideas: paradigm shifts and methods, fuzzy logic, illocutionary force, the analytic-synthetic distinction, supervenience and deductive-nomological explanation; Toulmin diagrams must be mentioned next. This has to be impressive and surprising to any intellectual historian. The picture of Toulmin's work is a bit different in my mind, even with the evidence of these citation counts. To me, Toulmin's "Uses of Argument" is no more courageous than H.L.A. Hart's introduction of the term "defeasible" to philosophical logic and analytic philosophy. Although Hart does not use the word "argument" much, it has always seemed to me that Toulmin's position is highly derivative from Hart's. To me, Toulmin does not give sufficient attribution to Hart's related thought. Toulmin's exact and only textual reference is: These distinctions [analytic versus substantial arguments], will not be particularly novel to those who have studied explicitly the logic of special types of practical argument: the topic of exceptions or conditions of rebuttal, for instance -- which were labeled (R) in our pattern of analysis -- has been discussed by Professor H.L.A. Hart under the title of 'defeasibility,' and he has shown its relevance not only to the jurisprudential study of contract but also to philosophical theories about free-will and responsibility. (It is probably no accident that he reached these results while working in the borderland between jurisprudence and philosophy.) Toulmin moves immediately to Sir David Ross's prima facie qualification of moral rules and never returns to Hart. Once one has conceived of the defeasible connective, it is not much of a leap to consider connections among defeasible rules and tree-shaped derivations as arguments. But Toulmin's 1958 work is essential in the history of argumentation. First, Hart appeared to abandon the position, or in any case, refused to defend it. Dialectical logical form resided in one place only: in the hands of Toulmin, for nearly two decades, as deductive logicians spread their dogma. This is of tremendous intellectual historical importance. I think of nascent mammalian life hiding in caves while pre-Cambrian life dominated the surface of the earth. Toulmin provided a lone outpost of resistance, a single place where the fire burned during a long winter, where dialectical travelers of the logical landscape could stop for a rest. Some would re-discover the defeasible conditional as a contortion of deductive conditionals, but there has been a long and respectable development of argumentative form and its ramifications, awaiting the return of mathematical logicians. Second, Toulmin's penchant for reaching non-specialists in his broad writing, the "informal logicians," and the teachers of good writing style, was essential to the growth of the study of argumentation. There are no competing sources of argument in rhetoric. Not the elegance of Chaim Perelman's French, nor the accessibility of Ronald Munson's texts, nor the prolixity of Doug Walton's meditations can compare to the common, democratic, plain-faced, singularly cogent appeal of Toulmin. I believe that Rescher, with his brevity and scholarship, eclipses Toulmin in his "Dialectics," which is almost a poetic work. But the 1977 timing of Rescher's monograph was not good, and the little Rescher book had little impact. Meanwhile, everyone associated with scholarship in rhetoric, dialectic, or informal logic seems to have read Toulmin's "Uses of Argument." Finally, Toulmin's suggestion of a method of diagramming argument was fortuitous indeed! It is a method which we can all find slightly comical in its simplicity. I remember thinking how naive it seemed in the hands of University of Colorado-Boulder Computer-Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) technologists in the late eighties. But it is a diagram that has survived all competitors, and which delivers its underlying philosophy unmistakably. One cannot draw a Toulmin diagram without understanding that an argument is not a proof, and this understanding immediately elevates the discussion above deductive logical misunderstandings. One can even argue philosophical and logical fine points in the deployment of these modest box and arrow primitives. In retrospect, Toulmin's diagrams make Peirce's Venn-like diagrams and Frege's skewed branching trees seem vulgar and confining. In time, argumentation should overcome even fuzzy predication and fuzzy connectives as the most important nondeductive development in the history of logic. I don't know how long it will take for citation counts to show this as a fact. Probably it will take a long time for scholars to come to this position, and citation counts may soon lose their meaning, as publication and citation habits change. Nevertheless, the student of argument must take heart in the citation evidence that is already available for comparative impact. I had approached this article by preparing all kinds of apologies for the seminal philosophical logician, relative to the mathematical logician or technically nonstandard logician. I had expected mathematical uses of logic to be more numerous than references to logical styles of reasoning. I had expected that AGM belief revision or modal deontic logic, as two examples, would be bigger than Toulmin's argument in the citation databases. I am happy to report that I was unduly pessimistic. We can claim that Toulmin's "Uses of Argument," and Stephen Toulmin's work in general, have been essential contributions to twentieth century thought, and the citation counts are clearly there as grounds for the claim.