Alison Wylie

Alison Wylie is one of the few full-time academic philosophers of the social and historical sciences on the planet today. And fortunately for us, she happens to specialise in archaeology! After emerging onto the archaeological theory scene in the mid-1980s with her work on analogy, she has continued to work on philosophical questions raised by archaeological practice. In particular, she explores the status of evidence and ideals of objectivity in contemporary archaeology: how do we think we know about the past? Her other key interests include feminist initiatives in Anglo-American archaeology, and ethical conflicts in current archaeological practice. Kathryn Denning recently asked about her adventures in archaeology and academia and her thoughts on archaeology’s past, present, and future.

Critical theory is construed in very broad terms in Leone, Potter, and Shackel's discussion. It is not restricted to the "critical theory" associated with the Frankfurt school or, latterly, with Habermas. It encom-passes any research program that adopts a critically self-conscious attitude toward its constituent presuppositions: as they describe it, "critical theory asks of any set of conclusions from what point of view they are constructed." To press for such reflexiveness is crucially important, but a number of important things drop out or are left unspecified when "critical theory" is construed this broadly. For example, what is the standpoint of the critical theorist, and to what criteria of acceptability is the exercise of unmasking answerable? What sort of commentary does the unmasking provide on contemporary contexts, and how is one to determine when it is accurate in what it reveals about the conditions and interests informing practice? Leone et al. stop at the point where the most interesting and difficult questions arise. This is not to fault their analysis or their recommendations but to suggest what seem some important avenues for development of their critical initiative that remain to be explored.

Michael Fotiadis (1994) and Barbara Little (1994) both question the oppositions that structure current debate about the "objectivity" of archaeological science; they raise concerns about my own proposal for a "mitigated objectivism" where it reaffirms these oppositions. I welcome their discussion and offer three responses to clarify and situate my own position. Most valuable, they identify several lines of inquiry that should be pursued beyond the philosophical analyses I have developed, in this instance of gender research.

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 successes realized? What gives us confidence in the credibility and robustness, the trustworthiness, of the evidential claims based on archaeological data? And, what constitute best practices in building evidential claims, critically scrutinizing them and putting them to work in archaeological contexts? Rather than retreat to abstractions about how how science operates in the ideal, we approach this question by interrogating a number of close-to-the-ground case studies with the aim of teasing out the wisdom embodied in archaeological practice. The cases we consider – of fieldwork, strategies for working with old evidence, and the role of external resources – illuminate the role of various types of inferential scaffolding and bring into focus practice-grounded epistemic norms that we believe serve archaeologists better than the all-or-nothing ideals of truth and objectivity that dominate programmatic debate.

In response to those who see rational deliberation as a source of epistemic norms and a model for well-functioning scientific inquiry, Solomon cites evidence that aggregative techniques often yield better results; deliberative processes are vulnerable to biasing mechanisms that impoverish the epistemic resources on which group judgments are based. I argue that aggregative techniques are similarly vulnerable and illustrate this in terms of the impact of gender schemas on both individual and collective judgment. A consistently externalist and socially naturalized approach calls for symmetrical treatment of these strategies for capitalizing on what groups know.

Although I have little sympathy for Nagel's instrumentalism, his "dictum" on the debates over scientific realism (as Boyd refers to it) is disconcertingly accurate; it does seem as if "the already long controversy...can be prolonged indefinitely." The reason for this, however, is not that realists and instrumentalists are divided by merely terminological differences in their "preferred mode[s] of speech", indeed, this analysis appeals only if you are already convinced that realism of any robust sort is mistaken. The debates persist, instead, because the most sophisticated positions on either side now incorporate self-justifying conceptions of the aim of philosophy and of the standards of adequacy appropriate for judging philosophical theories of science. Realism and anti realism thus confront one another as preferred and essentially incommensurable modes of philosophical practice; it is in this sense that they have "dialectical resources for maintaining [their positions] in face of [virtually any] criticism." In what follows I first give an analysis of the central forms of argument for realism and anti realist responses to them that shows how the locus of debate has shifted to metaphilosophical issues. This is the basis for characterizing and assessing the forms of philosophical practice that are now emerging; my thesis is that there are strong grounds for preferring realism if the competing positions are judged as comprehensive research programs.

During the 1998 Victoria CAA conference, an afternoon was devoted to a plenary discussion on the future of archaeology in Canada, and particularly the role the CAA should take in this future. The plenary was divided into two sections. First, a series of presenters discussed the future of Canadian archaeology from their particular vantage at the intersection of government, academe, First Nations and private industry. The second half of the plenary consisted of a series of presentations from CAA committee chairs, presenting some tangible ideas on the directions the CAA may need to take in responding to the challenges of change. The following represents the compiled presentations offered during the first half of the plenary, along with some compiled observations and conclusions on the challenges and opportunities facing both the CAA and the archaeological community in this country. This is then followed by a series of commentaries on the plenary presentations, solicited from a number of archaeologists from different sectors of the CAA community. As the CAA begins a new millennium, century, or just start to another year, the issues raised in the presentations and commentaries, particularly in terms of the role the CAA sees for itself, will need to be met with more than talk.

I explore the relevance of feminist standpoint theory for understanding the development of gender research in archaeology. This is an approach to thinking about questions about gender in archaeology that I find fruitfully articulated in Jane Kelley and Marsha Hanen's analysis of the 1989 Chacmool abstracts. As standpoint theory has been reformulated in recent years it offers a strategy for understanding critically and constructively-what is (and is not) feminist about gender archaeology, and it suggests some guidelines for realizing "strong objectivity" (as Harding describes it) in archaeological contexts.

This article is a profile of the journal Hypatia for TPM: its founding, its mission, and central themes that figure in its close to 30 year publication history. When the first issues of Hypatia appeared in the mid-1980s they were the culmination, in the mid-1980s, of a decade-long process of visionary debate in the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP) about what form a journal of feminist philosophy should take, and extended discussion of how to make it a reality. The guiding vision and a signature strength of Hypatia has always been its pluralism. The touchstone for the new generations of feminist philosophers who founded and now sustain Hypatia has been the real world, experiential and political issues that have galvanized feminist activism and scholarship since the late 1960s – directing attention to new questions as well as reframing the old.

The recent Science Wars have brought into sharp focus, in a public forum, contentious questions about the authority of science and what counts as properly scientific practice that have long structured archaeological debate. As in the larger debate, localized disputes in archaeology often presuppose a conception of science as a unified enterprise defined by common goals, standards, and research programs; specific forms of inquiry are advocated (or condemned) by claiming afiliation with sciences so conceived. This pattern of argument obscures much that is most creative in archaeological practice. Archaeologists routinely exploit both integrating and fragmenting relations among the sciences, especially in establishing evidential claim. I will argue that the credibility of these claims is a function, not of scientific status acquired by corporate affiliation, but of the substantive trade in tools and techniques, empirical insights, models, and theories that is made possible by local interactions between archaeology and a wide range of other disciplines. There is much more to be gained by developing a rich critical understanding of the interfield relations that make this trade possible than by appealing to generic ideals of science.

Research on the status and experience of women in academia in the last 30 years has challenged conventional explanations of persistent gender inequality, bringing into sharp focus the cumulative impact of small scale, often unintentional differences in recognition and response: the patterns of 'post-civil rights era' dis­crimination made famous by the 1999 report on the status of women in the MIT School of Science. I argue that feminist standpoint theory is a useful resource for understanding how this sea change in understanding gender inequity was realized. At the same time, close attention to activist research on workplace environment issues suggests ways in which our understanding of standpoint theory can fruitfully be refined. I focus on the implications of two sets of distinctions: between types of epistemic injustice (and correlative advantage) that may affect marginalized knowers; and between the resources of situated knowledge and those of a critical standpoint on knowledge production.