From arguments to decisions: Extending the Toulmin view

Abstract

In his 1958 essays Toulmin criticises "scientific views of logic and probability, suggesting that these philosophical and theoretical frameworks have failed to accommodate features of everyday dispute and debate. He offers an alternative perspective, summarised by his famous argumentation schema. He draws primarily on legal and regulatory examples, but we have found that medicine and science also provide rich sources of argumentation examples and many of these fit the Toulmin schema. However the decisionmaking elements of clinical judgement suggest the need for extensions to the standard layout. This paper presents a view of argumentation based decision making that preserves the essence of the Toulmin model but in an extended form. © 2006 Springer.