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Sherrington said that science lives on its facts. This Dr. Toulmin expresses less elegantly but more clearly by saying that 'theories draw their life from the phenomena they are used to explain'. The fault of the popularizers of science has been that they have expounded theories in terms of allegorical imagery instead of in terms of the empirical data on which they are based. In a book on the Philosophy of Science, limited by the publishers to approximately 180 pages, Dr. Toulmin has decided to set himself only one task. This is to explain to the layman (or student of philosophy) what a scientific theory means to a scientist, and to investigate its logical basis. The psycho-analyst, who may know that Dr. Toulmin has already made contributions to the logical status of his science, may register disappointment on finding that the book virtually confines itself to physics, referring to the biological sciences only in explanatory asides, and to psychology not at all. Moreover, there is no reference to symbolic logic, which the author has himself used in some of these contributions. But there can be no doubt that if his task was to be performed within his limitations of space he had no choice but to make these sacrifices. Instead, he bases his examination of the logic of science on the simplest theories of physics, such as those of geometrical optics.
Dr. Toulmin sets out to lay ghosts. Following Wittgenstein—more or less—he attacks Causality, Determinism and Laws of Nature. In Determinism