The Road Not Taken: Stephen Toulmin and a Failed Practice-Turn in Mid-Twentieth Century Philosophy of Science

Abstract The “turn to practice” in philosophy of science is generally thought to have begun in the 1980s, exemplified by the work of the “new experimentalists” like Ian Hacking. But this was not— as some have claimed— the first work in philosophy of science to advocate explicitly and self-consciously for a turn to practice. That work appeared three decades earlier, and owed its largest debt to the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Misleadingly titled The Philosophy of Science: An Introduction, the book was Stephen Toulmin’s attempt to reorient philosophy of science around a different set of themes than those that prevailed in the 1950s. In this paper, I reconstruct some key features of Toulmin’s early philosophy with the aim of exhibiting the comprehensive influence of the later Wittgenstein. I argue that the main utility of this exercise is to draw attention to an unrealized possibility— a road not taken in twentieth century philosophy of science, but that might still be explored with profit.