The London Review of Books has an interesting review on a new book by Stephen Toulmin, Return to Reason.
Return to Reason repeats the historical sketch in Cosmopolis of how canons of Rationality came to dominate the criteria of reasonableness, how talk of the Universal and the Eternal subjugated the local and the timely, how the Dreams of Certainty and Method confidently promised permanent practical solutions to doubt, ambiguity and the plurality of belief.
The dilemma I face is whether to read a book when I already agree with most of the ideas outlined in the review. Given how many books I already want to read I ask myself whether I want to add another to the list.
I did, however, particularly like the stab at disciplinary boundaries below:
The Quest for Certainty travels along the channels historically carved out by the specialist disciplines, and Toulmin doesn't much like the disciplines either. The condition of their success is a narrowing of perception, and it's this narrowing that helps keep disciplinary specialists from noticing the mismatch between the real world and their idealised constructions. In a world of disciplinary departments, the world is nobody's department. The disciplines arose, Toulmin says, from the 18th century largely as a way of ensuring intellectual peace through boundary-maintenance: we won't look at your thing if you don't look at ours.
I run into the problem of disciplinary boundaries whenver I try to explain what I trying to do with a Masters of Liberal Studies. It is much harder to explain than a masters in math, physics, computer science, philosophy, linguistics, sociology, anthropology, history, or English might be. The labels are conversational shorthands I often wish I could fall back on - in conversation especially.
but in his view we are now in bondage to the disciplines and our society is paying a practical price for rampant specialisation. When this is combined with the tyranny of abstraction, and when elegance trumps pertinence, then things have got out of control.
I have a quibble with this point, especially the dig about a 'tyranny of abstraction.' Remaining in the practicable world is worthwhile but the tyranny is less something we need to overthrow and more something we should integrate into the world. Abstraction continues to be one of the most powerful intellectual tools human beings possess and should not be abandoned.
The solution I want to see is the application of abstractions to the real-world. Abstractions become interesting precisely when they begin to run into obstacles. Unfortunately there is no standard discipline I know of which studies the intersections between abstraction and application.
1:07:32 PM 
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