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A Proliferation of New Archaeologies: Skepticism, Processualism, and Post-ProcessualismIn Norman Yoffee & Andrew Sherratt (eds.), Archaeological theory: who sets the agenda?, Cambridge University Press. pp. 20-26. 1993.
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10Gender Theory and the Archaeological RecordIn Margaret Wright Conkey & Joan M. Gero (eds.), Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory : Conference Entitled "Women and Production in Prehistory" : Papers, . pp. 31-54. 1991.
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50Rethinking objectivity: Nozick's neglected third optionInternational Studies in the Philosophy of Science 14 (1). 2000.
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An Expanded Behavioral Archaeology: Transformation and Redefinition Twenty Years OnIn James M. Skibo, William H. Walker & Axel E. Nielsen (eds.), Quest for the King, University of Utah Press. pp. 198-209. 1995.
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764Women in Philosophy: The Costs of Exclusion—Editor's IntroductionHypatia 26 (2): 374-382. 2011.Philosophy has the dubious distinction of attracting and retaining proportionally fewer women than any other field in the humanities, indeed, fewer than in all but the most resolutely male-dominated of the sciences. This short article introduces a thematic cluster that brings together five short essays that probe the reasons for and the effects of these patterns of exclusion, not just of women but of diverse peoples of all kinds in Philosophy. It summarizes some of the demographic measures of ex…Read more
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Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of ScienceIn Kang Ouyang & Steve Fuller (eds.), Contemporary British and American Philosophy and Philosophers, People's Press. 2002.
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10On "Heavily Decomposing Red Herrings": Scientific Methodology in Archaeology and the Ladening of Evidence with TheoryIn Lester Embree (ed.), Metaarchaeology: Reflections by Archaeologists and Philosophers, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science. pp. 269-288. 1992.Internal debates over the status and aims of archaeology—between processualists and post or anti-processualists—have been so sharply adversarial, and have generated such sharply polarized positions, that they obscure much common ground. Despite strong rhetorical opposition, in practice, all employ a range of strategies for building and assessing the empirical credibility of their claims that reveals a common commitment to some form of mitigated objectivism. To articulate what this comes to, an a…Read more
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33The Philosophy of Ambivalence: Sandra Harding onThe Science Question in FeminismCanadian Journal of Philosophy 17 (sup1): 58-73. 1987.In the past three decades scholars in virtually every humanistic and social scientific research discipline, and in some natural sciences, have drawn attention to quite striking instances of gender bias in the modes of practice and theorizing typical of traditional fields of research. They generally begin by identifying explicit androcentric biases in definitions of the subject domains appropriate to specific scientific fields. Their primary targets, in this connection, have been research that le…Read more
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33Epistemological Issues Raised by a Structuralist ArchaeologyIn Ian Hodder (ed.), Symbolic and Structural Archaeology, Cambridge University Press. pp. 39-46. 1982.Insofar as the material residues of interest to archaeologists are cultural and, as such, have specifically symbolic significance, it is argued that archaeology must employ some form of structuralist analysis (i.e. as specifically concerned with this aspect of the material). Wylie examines the prevalent notion that such analysis is inevitably 'unscientific' because it deals with a dimension of material culture which is inaccessible of any direct, empirical investigation, and argues that this res…Read more
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Philosophy of ArchaeologyIn Edward Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Genealogy to Iqbal, Routledge. pp. 354-359. 1996.
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34Testing Scientific Theories, John Earman (Ed.): Explaining Confirmation Practice:Testing Scientific Theories John EarmanPhilosophy of Science 55 (2): 292-. 1988.The contributions to Testing Scientific Theories are unified by an in-terest in responding to criticisms directed by Glymour against existing models of confirmation—chiefly H-D and Bayesian schemas—and in assessing and correcting the "bootstrap" model of confirmation that he proposed as an alternative in Theory and Evidence (1980). As such, they provide a representative sample of objections to Glymour's model and of the wide range of new initiatives in thinking about scientific confirmation that…Read more
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767Thinking from Things: Essays in the Philosophy of ArchaeologyUniversity of California Press. 2002.In this long-awaited compendium of new and newly revised essays, Alison Wylie explores how archaeologists know what they know. Preprints available for download. Please see entry for specific article of interest.
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1233’Do Not Do Unto Others…’: Cultural Misrecognition and the Harms of Appropriation in an Open Source WorldIn Geoffrey Scarre & Robin Coningham (eds.), Appropriating the past: philosophical perspectives on the practice of archaeology, Cambridge University Press. pp. 195-221. 2013.In this chapter we explore two important questions that we believe should be central to any discussion of the ethics and politics of cultural heritage: What are the harms associated with appropriation and commodification, specifically where the heritage of Indigenous peoples is concerned? And how can these harms best be avoided? Archaeological concerns animate this discussion; we are ultimately concerned with fostering postcolonial archaeological practices. But we situate these questions in a br…Read more
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16On Scepticism, Philosophy, and Archaeological ScienceCurrent Anthropology 33 (2): 209-214. 1992.
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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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750Material 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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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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769Archaeology 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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1689Evidential 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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