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Toulmin rejects this approach and grounds his exploration of how concepts are shared, generation to generation, and how they may mutate in the process, by studying the influences of socio-historical processes and intellectual procedures on collective understanding; by comparing different historical and cultural contexts of various positions; and by including recent discoveries in psychological and physiological research that focused on the brain as it pertained to knowledge acquisition and retention. His emphasis is on scientific concepts, and in this regard stands as a lesser known and less appreciated alternative to Kuhn’s famous work, though Toulmin also explored concept formation and evolution in engineering and the applied sciences.

The first important aspect of this work is its groundbreaking, meticulous analysis of human understanding by virtue of our historical and cultural context(s), as well as the further permutations afforded by the wiring of our brains. Toulmin persuades powerfully that the tradition of Cartesian (and Platonic) abstraction does not adequately represent the way we think and understand in real-world circumstances. To grasp human understanding, we must root ourselves in such situational circumstances as the workplace and the academic discipline, and note the customs of communication and forums for idea exchange these settings entail. The medium of academic life, for example, as well as the medium of neurological networks inside our head, are salient conditions for delving into the collective use and evolution of concepts.

The second important feature of Toulmin’s work is the analog nature of his study. Because it was written in 1972, there is no mention of the Internet, or a computer, or the web; “digital” does not appear in the book, nor does “software.” This is of course unsurprising. The means of concept transmission in Toulmin’s world is slow by our standards; there are numerous references to academic disciplines; and the more common timeframe is posited as generational.

It is prudent to disaggregate the academic culture in which Toulmin was writing nearly forty years ago from his methodology. We can easily appreciate the distinct pace and procedures of higher education between then and now, but the medium—the networks and processes and customs and historical influences—are worlds apart.

In the recent collection of essays, Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice , the implications of our relocating from an analog to a digital commons for creating, sharing, and preserving knowledge is explored. One of the salient features of this new digital environment is what editors Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom define as “hyperchange”: rapid, exponential, discontinuous, and chaotic. Aspects of this hyperchange include increasingly permeable boundaries between knowledge creators, publishers, and readers; more flexible iterations of the processes and products of scholarly communication; the rise of new methodologies; greater collaboration within and among disciplines; a more porous flow of original research among undergraduates, graduates, and faculty.