Add to ORKGThe paper discusses Toulmin’s ideas in the philosophy of science – mainly as set out in The Philosophy of Science (1953) – in juxtaposition with Toulmin’s reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. It claims that three themes present in the Tractatus had an influence on the core of Toulmin’s ideas about scientific explanation: first, Wittgenstein’s use of the term “Bild” – interpreted, after Hertz and Boltzmann, as “a model”, also a mathematical one; second, the active, not passive, element in our forming a model (expressed in Proposition 2.1); and, third, the account of the system of mechanics as a kind of formal net (resp. “models”) with possibly different shapes of “meshes” (the passages from 6.34 on). Thus, Toulmin’s thinking of scientific th...