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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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35Humanizing 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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769Bearing 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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235Radiocarbon 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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2326Introduction: 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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564How 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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1329From 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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What’s Feminist about Gender Archaeology?In Que(e)rying Archaeology: Proceedings of the 36th Annual Chacmool Conference, University of Calgary Archaeology Association. pp. 282-289. 2009.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 …Read more
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34Feminist Critiques of Science: The Epistemological and Methodological LiteratureWomen's Studies International Forum 12 (3): 379-388. 1989.Feminist critiques of science are widely dispersed and often quite inaccessible as a body of literature. We describe briefly some of the influences evident in this literature and identify several key themes which are central to current debates. This is the introduction to a bibliography of general critiques of science, described as the “core literature,” and a selection of feminist critiques of biology. Our objective has been to identify those analyses which raise reflexive (epistemological and …Read more
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14Review of M. Bunge, Finding Philosophy in Social ScienceUniversity of Toronto Quarterly 67 (1): 121-124. 1997.
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34Archaeological Cables and Tacking: The Implications of Practice for Bernstein's 'Options Beyond Objectivism and Relativism'Philosophy of the Social Sciences 19 (1): 1-18. 1989.
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75The promise and perils of an ethic of stewardshipIn Lynn Meskell & Peter Pels (eds.), Embedding Ethics, Berg. pp. 47--68. 2005.
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36Ethical dilemmas in archaeological practice: Looting, repatriation, stewardship, and the (trans) formation of disciplinary identityPerspectives on Science 4 (2): 154-194. 1996.North American archaeologists have long defined their ethical responsibilities in terms of a commitment to scientific goals and an opposition to looting, vandalism, the commercial trade in antiquities, and other activities that threaten archaeological resources. In recent years, the clarity of these commitments has been eroded from two directions: professional archaeologists find commercial entanglements increasingly unavoidable, and a number of nonarchaeological interest groups object that they…Read more
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Philosophy of Archaeology; Philosophy in ArchaeologyIn Stephen Turner & Mark Risjord (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology, Elsevier. pp. 517-549. 2007.
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3521Standpoint Theory, in ScienceIn James Wright (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition), Elsevier. pp. 324-330. 2001.Standpoint theory is based on the insight that those who are marginalized or oppressed have distinctive epistemic resources with which to understand social structures. Inasmuch as these structures shape our understanding of the natural and lifeworlds, standpoint theorists extend this principle to a range of biological and physical as well as social sciences. Standpoint theory has been articulated as a social epistemology and as an aligned methodological stance. It provides the rationale for ‘sta…Read more
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63Coming to Terms with the Value(s) of Science: Insights from Feminist Science ScholarshipIn Harold Kincaid, John Dupre & Alison Wylie (eds.), Value-Free Science? Ideals and Illusions, Oxford University Press, Usa. pp. 58-86. 2007.
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2On EthicsIn Larry Zimmerman, Karen D. Vitelli & Julie Hollowell-Zimmer (eds.), Handbook on Ethical Issues in Archaeology, Altamira Press. pp. 3-16. 2003.
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21Philippa Levine. The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England 1838–1886. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, ix + 210 pp., $42.50 (cloth). - Robert E. Bieder Science Encounters the Indian, 1820–1880: The Early Years of American Ethnology. Norman, Oklahoma: Oklahoma University Press, 1986, xi + 290 pp., $21.95 (cloth) (review)Philosophy of Science 57 (3): 546-. 1990.
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17The Feminist Question in Science: What Does It Mean to 'Do Social Science as a Feminist"?In Sharlene Hesse-Biber (ed.), Handbook of Feminist Research, Sage Publications. pp. 567-578. 2007.
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