This seminal study of how geology and biology became historical sciences was written by the philosopher Stephen Toulmin and the historian and scientist June Goodfield. It was published by Harper & Row in 1965 and has been reprinted regularly since then by the University of Chicago Press.

p. 49

Quoting Lucretius’ poem On the Nature of Things: “Our age cannot look back to earlier things except where reasoning reveals their traces.”

p. 50

The Limits of the Classical World Picture lists the accomplishments for which later generations were indebted to the Greek philosophers: “they had experimented with almost all the forms of theory which were to dominate later thought, and had recognized the characteristic merits and defects of each. In Plato’s Timaeus, we have the nearest thing in pre-Christian philosophy to a `Big-Bang’ cosmology, in Aristotle the outlines of a `Steady-State’ theory: the Stoics, in turn, pioneered a `Cyclical Cosmos’, while the Epicureans saw the development of the world rather as a random, One-Way Process. Not until many centuries later could scientists put the history of Nature on a solid basis of established facts and secure inferences.”

p. 262

Speaking about the current state of inquiry into cosmological origins, Toulmin and Goodfield look to the history of thought in geology and biology for guidance: “In all other historical sciences, the crucial transition to the phase of cumulative advance has been marked by a changeover from a priori patterns of theory to an empirical, developmental method of enquiry.”

p. 263

“It has always been a struggle for men to renounce the apparent short-cuts which a priori patterns of theory offer them, and to build up a genuinely empirical account of historical change and development laboriously and without preconceptions.”

p. 266

The discovery of time in geology and biology each required several key components:

• recognition of the extent of the past; and
• identification of developmental processes, including
  • repetitive universal factors operative at all times and places, and
  • cumulative and progressive conditional factors significant at particular stages

How does archaeology fit in?

I’d argue that archaeology has not become an historical science because it has yet to come to grips with the conditional factor. The best analogue for the geologists’ use of the fossil record is the division of Old World archaeology into the Old and New Stone Ages, Bronze Age, and Iron Age, a system that can’t be applied meaningfully to the New World. The heroic effort of evolutionary archaeologists to work out a cultural version of biological evolution holds promise, but has yet to bear substantial fruit.

Perhaps it is time to think outside the box?

Here is a BibTeX entry:

@Book{toulmin65:_discov_time,
  address = {New York, NY},
  year = {1965},
  publisher = {Harper \& Row},
  title = {The Discovery of Time},
  author = {Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield}
}