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45The philosophy exception website projectJournal of Social Philosophy. forthcoming.Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.
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3Bootstrapping in Un-Natural Sciences: Archaeological Theory TestingPSA Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1986 (1): 314-321. 1986.Glymour’s boostrapping account of confirmation is meant to show how it is that evidence can bear on a theory in a discriminating, noncircular way even when that theory is used to establish the inferential link between evidence and a test hypothesis. Evidence confirms a theory on his account if, “using the theory, we can deduce from the evidence an instance of the hypothesis i.e., an hypothesis comprising or instantiating the test theory, and the deduction is such that it does not guarantee that …Read more
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Material evidence: learning from archaeological practiceIn Alison Wylie & Robert Chapman (eds.), Material Evidence, Routledge. 2014.
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31Humanizing Science and Philosophy of Science: George Sarton, Contextualist Philosophies of Science, and the Indigenous/Science ProjectCanadian Journal of Philosophy 52 (3): 256-278. 2022.A century ago historian of science George Sarton argued that “science is our greatest treasure, but it needs to be humanized or it will do more harm than good”. The systematic cultivation of an “historical spirit,” a philosophical appreciation of the dynamic nature of scientific inquiry, and a recognition that science is irreducibly a “collective enterprise” was, on Sarton’s account, crucial to the humanizing mission he advocated. These elements of Sarton’s program are more relevant than ever as…Read more
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14Collaborations in Indigenous and Community-Based Archaeology: Preserving the Past TogetherAssociation for Washington Archaeology 19 15-33. 2020.This paper examines the outcomes of Preserving the Past Together, a workshop series designed to build the capacity of local heritage managers to engage in collaborative and community-based approaches to archaeology and historic preservation. Over the past two decades practitioners of these approaches have demonstrated the interpretive, methodological, and ethical value of integrating Indigenous perspectives and methods into the process and practice of heritage management and archaeology. Despite…Read more
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766Bearing Witness: What Can Archaeology Contribute in an Indian Residential School Context?In Chelsea H. Meloche, Katherine L. Nichols & Laure Spake (eds.), Working with and for Ancestors: Collaboration in the Care and Study of Ancestral Remains, Routledge. pp. 21-31. 2020.We explore our role as researchers and witnesses in the context of an emerging partnership with the Penelakut Tribe, the aim of which is to locate the unmarked graves of children who died while attending the notorious Kuper Island Indian Residential School on their territory (southwest British Columbia). This relationship is in the process of taking shape, so we focus on understanding conditions for developing trust, and the interactional expertise necessary to work well together, with a good he…Read more
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234Radiocarbon Dating in Archaeology: Triangulation and TraceabilityIn Sabina Leonelli & Niccolò Tempini (eds.), Data Journeys in the Sciences, Springer. pp. 285-301. 2020.When radiocarbon dating techniques were applied to archaeological material in the 1950s they were hailed as a revolution. At last archaeologists could construct absolute chronologies anchored in temporal data backed by immutable laws of physics. This would make it possible to mobilize archaeological data across regions and time-periods on a global scale, rendering obsolete the local and relative chronologies on which archaeologists had long relied. As profound as the impact of 14C dating has bee…Read more
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16Rock, Bone, and Ruin: A Trace-centric AppreciationPhilosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 11. 2019.I am on record as a fan of Rock, Bone, and Ruin, and I was pleased to discover that, in our paired cover blurbs, Martin Rudwick and I make essentially the same point: the great virtue of Rock, Bone, and Ruin is that Adrian Currie combines what you might describe as a jeweler’s-eye view, in his attention to the messy details of research practice in the historical sciences, with a cartographer’s breadth of vision that, as Rudwick puts it, leads him to “explore the surprising commonalities that und…Read more
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2314Introduction: When Difference Makes a DifferenceEpisteme 3 (1-2): 1-7. 2006.Taking seriously the social dimensions of knowledge puts pressure on the assumption that epistemic agents can usefully be thought of as autonomous, interchangeable individuals, capable, insofar as they are rational and objective, of transcending the specificities of personal history, experience, and context. If this idealization is abandoned as the point of departure for epistemic inquiry, then differences among situated knowers come sharply into focus. These include differences in cognitive cap…Read more
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35*PSA 2016, symposium on “Data in Time: Epistemology of Historical Data” organized by Sabina Leonelli, 5 November 2016* *See published version: "Radiocarbon Dating in Archaeology: Triangulation and Traceability" in Data Journeys in the Sciences (2020) - link below* Archaeologists put a premium on pressing “legacy data” into service, given the notoriously selective and destructive nature of their practices of data capture. Legacy data consist of material and records that been assembled ove…Read more
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5The Philosophy of Ambivalence: Sandra Harding on The Science Question in FeminismCanadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 13 (n/a): 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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561How Archaeological Evidence Bites Back: Strategies for Putting Old Data to Work in New WaysScience, Technology, and Human Values 42 (2): 203-225. 2017.Archaeological data are shadowy in a number of senses. Not only are they notoriously fragmentary but the conceptual and technical scaffolding on which archaeologists rely to constitute these data as evidence can be as constraining as it is enabling. A recurrent theme in internal archaeological debate is that reliance on sedimented layers of interpretative scaffolding carries the risk that “preunderstandings” configure what archaeologists recognize and record as primary data, and how they interpr…Read more
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1325From the Ground Up: Philosophy and Archaeology, 2017 Dewey LectureProceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 91 118-136. 2017.I’m often asked why, as a philosopher of science, I study archaeology. Philosophy is so abstract and intellectual, and archaeology is such an earth-bound, data-driven enterprise, what could the connection possibly be? This puzzlement takes a number of different forms. In one memorable exchange in the late 1970s when I was visiting Oxford as a graduate student an elderly don, having inquired politely about my research interests, tartly observed that archaeology isn’t a science, so I couldn’t poss…Read more
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3On a Hierarchy of Purposes: Typological Theory and PracticeCurrent Anthropology 33 (4): 486-491. 1992.
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1643Evidential 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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682Introduction: 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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44Social 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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27Bootstrapping 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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309Archaeological 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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51Feminism 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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