TEACHING HOW TO DEVELOP AN ARGUMENT USING THE TOULMIN MODEL

Resumo

One of the competencies that Business Communication students must acquire is the capacity to select appropriate rhetorical strategies to persuade multiple audiences to accept business decisions or propositions. Strategies for building arguments have been studied for literally hundreds of years, and Aristotle’s rhetorical proofs, logos, pathos and ethos have been accepted as major guidelines for quite a long time. In the 1950s, two philosophers, Perelman and Toulmin, addressed the crucial problem of differentiating the construction of a kind of demonstration (trying to prove the truth) from the production of an argument (defending a point of view). Chaïm Perelman produced a taxonomy of arguments with logic carefully placed and Stephen Toulmin proposed the argument layout, an objective way to evaluate thinking that may be subjective and can be used to verify the soundness and completeness of arguments. Students can learn to apply the Toulmin layout through vivacious class discussion and proper assignments.