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746Material Evidence (edited book)Routledge. 2014.How do archaeologists make effective use of physical traces and material culture as repositories of evidence? Material Evidence is a collection of 19 essays that take a resolutely case-based approach to this question, exploring key instances of exemplary practice, instructive failures, and innovative developments in the use of archaeological data as evidence. The goal is to bring to the surface the wisdom of practice, teasing out norms of archaeological reasoning from evidence. -/- Archaeologi…Read more
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4Standpoint TheoryIn Robert Audi (ed.), Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Cambridge University Press. pp. 1021-1022. 1995.Standpoint theory is an explicitly political as well as social epistemology. It’s distinctive features are commitment to understand the social locations that shape the epistemic capacities and resources of individuals in structural terms, and a recognition that those who are marginalized within hierarchically structured systems of social differentiation are often epistemically advantaged. In some crucial domains they know more and know better as a contingent function of their situated experience…Read more
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134Critical distance : stabilising evidential claims in archaeologyIn Philip Dawid, William Twining & Mimi Vasilaki (eds.), Evidence, Inference and Enquiry, Oup/british Academy. 2011.The vagaries of evidential reasoning in archaeology are notorious: the material traces that comprise the archaeological record are fragmentary and profoundly enigmatic, and the inferential gap that archaeologists must cross to constitute them as evidence of the cultural past is a perennial source of epistemic anxiety. And yet we know a great deal about the cultural past, including vast reaches of the past for which this material record is our only source of evidence. The contents of this record…Read more
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17Rethinking the Quincentennial: Consequences for past and PresentAmerican Antiquity 57 (4): 591. 1992.In organizing a plenary session to mark the Quincentennial at the 1992 Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, our aim was not to provide a summary or review of archaeological research bearing on our understanding of "Columbian consequences." Rather, we sought speakers who could raise forward-looking questions about the sociopolitical entanglements and consequences of archaeology considered as, itself, part of the legacy of contact. The papers that follow, by Vine Deloria, Jalil …Read more
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56A more social epistemology: Decision vectors, epistemic fairness, and consensus in Solomon's social empiricismPerspectives on Science 16 (3). 2008.Solomon has made the case, in Social Empicism (2001) for socially naturalized analysis of the dynamics of scientific inquiry that takes seriously two critical insights: that scientific rationality is contingent, disunified, and socially emergent; and that scientific progress is often fostered by factors traditionally regarded as compromising sources of bias. While elements of this framework are widely shared, Solomon intends it to be more resolutely social, more thoroughly naturalizing, and more…Read more
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765Archaeology and Critical Feminism of Science: Interview with Alison WylieScientiae Studia 12 (3): 549-590. 2014.In this wide-ranging interview with three members of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sao Paolo (Brazil) Wylie explains how she came to work on philosophical issues raised in and by archaeology, describes the contextualist challenges to ‘received view’ models of confirmation and explanation in archaeology that inform her work on the status of evidence and contextual ideals of objectivity, and discusses the role of non-cognitive values in science. She also is pressed to explain w…Read more
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14Facts and Fictions: Writing Archaeology in a Different VoiceCanadian Journal of Archaeology 17 5-25. 1993.
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63Archaeological Finds: Legacies of Appropriation, Modes of ResponseIn James O. Young & Conrad G. Brunk (eds.), The Ethics of Cultural Appropriation, Wiley-blackwell. 2009.This chapter contains sections titled: Historical Contexts of Cultural Appropriation in Archaeology A Typology of Cultural Appropriation in Archaeology Modes of Resolution Conclusions Acknowledgments References.
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2The 'Illusion of Concreteness' and the Prospects for an Anthropology of Archaeology: Review of Explanation in Archaeology by Guy GibbonAmerican Anthropologist 94 (1). 1992.
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30Evidential Constraints: Pragmatic Objectivism in ArchaeologyIn Michael McIntyre & Lee McIntyre (eds.), Readings in the Philosophy of Social Science, Mit Press. pp. 747-765. 1994.
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3On a Hierarchy of Purposes: Typological Theory and PracticeCurrent Anthropology 33 (4): 486-491. 1992.
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1680Evidential Reasoning in ArchaeologyBloomsbury Academic Publishing. 2016.Material traces of the past are notoriously inscrutable; they rarely speak with one voice, and what they say is never unmediated. They stand as evidence only given a rich scaffolding of interpretation which is, itself, always open to challenge and revision. And yet archaeological evidence has dramatically expanded what we know of the cultural past, sometimes demonstrating a striking capacity to disrupt settled assumptions. The questions we address in Evidential Reasoning are: How are these succe…Read more
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The Demystification of the ProfessionIn Joan M. Gero, David M. Lacy & Michael L. Blakey (eds.), The Socio-Politics of Archaeology, University of Massachusetts. pp. 119-129. 1983.
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12Commentary on 'Entoptic Phenomena in Upper Paleolithic Art' by J.D. Lewis-Williams and T.A. DowsonCurrent Anthropology 29 231-232. 1988.
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711Introduction: Doing Archaeology as a FeministJournal of Archaeological Method and Theory 14 (3). 2007.Gender research archaeology has made significant contributions, but its dissociation from the resources of feminist scholarship and feminist activism is a significantly limiting factor in its development. The essays that make up this special issue illustrate what is to be gained by making systematic use of these resources. Their distinctively feminist contributions are characterized in terms of the recommendations for “doing science as a feminist” that have taken shape in the context of the long…Read more
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45Social constructionist arguments in Harding's science and social inequalityHypatia 23 (4). 2008.Harding’s aim in Science and Social Inequality is to integrate the insights generated by diverse critiques of conventional ideals of truth, value freedom, and unity in science, and to chart a way forward for the sciences and for science studies. Wylie assesses this synthesis as a genre of social constructionist argument and illustrates its implications for questions of epistemic warrant with reference to transformative research on gender-based discrimination in the workplace environment.
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29Bootstrapping in Un-Natural Sciences: Archaeological Theory TestingPSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1986. 1986.Several difficulties have been raised concerning applicability of Glymour's model to developing and "un-natural" sciences, those contexts in which he claims it should be most clearly instantiated. An analysis of testing in such a field, archaeology, indicates that while bootstrapping may be realized in general outline, practice necessarily departs from the ideal in at least three important respects 1) it is not strictly theory contained, 2) the theory-mediated inference from evidence to test hyp…Read more
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Review of Naturalism and Social Science by David ThomasInternational Studies in Philosophy 14 104-106. 1982.
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324Archaeological Facts in Transit: The ‘Eminent Mounds’ of Central North AmericaIn Peter Howlett & Mary S. Morgan (eds.), How well do facts travel?: the dissemination of reliable knowledge, Cambridge University Press. pp. 301-322. 2011.Archaeological facts have a perplexing character; they are often seen as less likely to “lie,” capable of bearing tangible, material witness to actual conditions of life, actions and events, but at the same time they are notoriously fragmentary and enigmatic, and disturbingly vulnerable to dispersal and attrition. As Trouillot (1995) argues for historical inquiry, the identification, selection, interpretation and narration of archaeological facts is a radically constructive process. Rather than …Read more
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Why Should Historical Archaeologists Study Capitalism?: The Logic of Question and Answer and the Challenge of Systemic AnalysisIn Mark P. Leone & Parker B. Potter (eds.), Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism, Kluwer Academic. pp. 23-50. 1999.
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52Feminism in philosophy of science: Making sense of contingency and constraintIn Miranda Fricker & Jennifer Hornsby (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy, Cambridge University Press. pp. 166--184. 2000.
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11Putting shakertown back together: Critical theory in archaeologyJournal of Anthropological Archaeology 4 (2): 133-147. 1985.
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504Epistemic Justice, Ignorance, and Procedural Objectivity—Editor's IntroductionHypatia 26 (2): 233-235. 2011.The groundwork has long been laid, by feminist and critical race theorists, for recognizing that a robust social epistemology must be centrally concerned with questions of epistemic injustice; it must provide an account of how inequitable social relations inflect what counts as knowledge and who is recognized as a credible knower. The cluster of papers we present here came together serendipitously and represent a striking convergence of interest in exactly these issues. In their different ways, …Read more
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12One World and Our Knowledge of It (review)International Studies in Philosophy 18 (3): 83-85. 1986.
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