Alison Wylie

University of British Columbia | UBC · Department of Philosophy

Patty Jo Watson Distinguished Lecture: Archaeology Division, American Anthropological Association Demands for accountability are transforming archaeology: accountability to descendant communities and to a growing range of public stakeholders who have an interest in archaeological research. What dominates high profile debate about these critical ch...

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 t...

Recent advocates of “field philosophy” make the case that philosophy “needs to get outside more often”; alongside disciplinary modes of practice we should cultivate philosophical work that is “practically engaged, stakeholder-centered, and timely” (Frodeman and Briggle 2016). As illustrated by The Guide to Field Philosophy (2020), this takes a grea...

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” (1924). 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 “colle...

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...

The contemporary academic environment in Canada has undergone reorganization based on neoliberal principles, and has increased attention focused on the importance of supporting interdisciplinary initiatives to address complex problems affecting global society. The purpose of our study was to examine the experience of people participating in a speci...

If collaborative archaeology is crossing a threshold, as several contributors to this special issue attest, nowhere is this more clearly evident than in the kinds of critical scrutiny it is attracting from those who are sceptical about its aims, its ethical/political integrity and its practical efficacy. There is a striking difference between the o...

The scientific analysis of material from Indigenous contexts raises key questions about researcher objectivity. Indigenous scholarship of their material heritage often invokes elements such as sentient landscapes and the intervention of spirit-beings in geological and human history. Some critical theorists propose that objectivity in any form is a...

Neste artigo, argumento que – ao expor o androcentrismo do sistema referencial de suposições consideradas como óbvias e levantando a questão da confi abilidade de normas entrincheiradas de justifi cação – a arqueologia de gênero é mais bem entendida como uma forma de construtivismo social relutante. Ela expõe inadvertidamente a contingência de comp...

I distinguish, by specificity and representational function, several different types of archaeological models: phenomenological, scaffolding, and explanatory models. These take the form of concrete, mathematical, and computational models (following Weisberg’s taxonomy), and they exemplify what Morgan describes as the double life of models; they var...

Archaeological data are shadowy in a number of senses. They are notoriously incomplete and fragmentary, and the sedimented layers of interpretive scaffolding on which archaeologists rely to constitute these data as evidence carry the risk that they will recognize only those data that conform to expectation. These epistemic anxieties further suggest...

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 life worlds, standpoint theorists extend this principle to a range of biological and physical as well as socia...

Innovative modes of collaboration between archaeologists and Indigenous communities are taking shape in a great many contexts, in the process transforming conventional research practice. While critics object that these partnerships cannot but compromise the objectivity of archaeological science, many of the archaeologists involved argue that their...

This chapter adopts a philosophical perspective on evidential reasoning in archaeology. It argues that strong relativist and scientistic positions in debates within anthropological archaeology are both based on simplistic assumptions. The 'scientists' set standards of credibility that are too high, while the relativists underestimate the confirmato...

Introduction Archaeological facts have a perplexing character. They are often seen as tangible, less likely to “lie” and more likely to bear impartial witness to actual actions, events, and conditions of life than do, for example, the memories reported by witnesses or participants. At the same time, however, they are notoriously enigmatic and incom...

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....

Introduction: Feminist Legacies / Feminist Futures: 25th Anniversary Special Issue - Volume 25 Issue V1 - Lori Gruen, Alison Wylie

This chapter examines the role of feminist values in archeology and developmental biology. It considers two case studies that illustrate a number of kinds of constructive difference that (feminist) contextual values can make to scientific practice. In the first set of cases considered, from archeology, the value commitments of knowers-their nonobje...

In this book an international team of archaeologists, philosophers, lawyers and heritage professionals addresses significant ethical questions about the rights to access, manage and interpret the material remains of the past. The chapters explore competing claims to interpret and appropriate the past and the major ethical issues associated with the...

It has long been thought that science is our best hope for realizing objective knowledge but that, to deliver on this promise, it must be free of the influence of any values that are not purely epistemic. As recent work in the philosophy, history, and social studies of science shows, however, things are not so simple. Values surface in numerous asp...

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 implicat...

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 source...

When Trigger argued, almost 25 years ago, that dominant archaeological narratives embody and transact nationalist, colonialist, and imperialist interests, he opened space for multivocality in two senses. In most general terms, he drew attention to the way in which all knowledge claims reflect and constitute the contexts of their production; in this...

This chapter discusses the philosophy of archaeology. Archaeology crosscuts a number of fields. In some contexts, it is treated as an autonomous discipline and is housed in free-standing archaeology departments and institutes, but more often, it is taught and practiced as a component of anthropology, art history, or classics. The intellectual tradi...

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 femin...

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...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In addressing these questions, virtually every contributor to the 1987-1988 special issues of Hypatia notes (albeit in very different ways) that they found themselves implicated in a sharply oppositional debate about the epistemic authority of science. The very possibility of feminist a...

Given the diversity of explanatory practices that is typical of the sciences a healthy pluralism would seem to be desirable where theories of explanation are concerned. Nevertheless, I argue that explanations are only unifying in Kitcher's unificationist sense if they are backed by the kind of understanding of underlying mechanisms, dispositions, c...

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 de...

As a working hypothesis for philosophy of science, the unity of science thesis has been decisively challenged in all its standard formulations; it cannot be assumed that the sciences presuppose an orderly world, that they are united by the goal of systematically describing and explaining this order, or that they rely on distinctively scientific met...

The Society for American Archaeology (SAA) has developed an extensive body of ethics guidelines for its members, most actively in the last two decades. This coincides with the period in which the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has taken a strong stand on the need for its affiliates to develop clear. enforceable codes of...

Since the early 1970s, advocates of the emerging field of historical archaeology have defended its worth and autonomy by appealing to the democratizing power of archaeological evidence over the alleged conservatism, the “inevitable elitism,” of text-bound history. Historical archaeology is the key, many have argued, to making visible “the inarticul...

The Society for American Archaeology (SAA) has developed an extensive body of ethics guidelines for its members, most actively in the last two decades. This coincides with the period in which the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has taken a strong stand on the need for its affiliates to develop clear, enforceable codes of...

Alison Wylie, Department of Philosophy, University of Western Ontario

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:...

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...

There seems the prospect, at this juncture, of articulating programs of research in science studies that will be genuinely interdisciplinary, integrating philosophical, historical, and sociological/anthropological interests in science. This introduction describes the rationale for the symposium, "Discourse, Practice, Context," to which four contrib...

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 sociopolitic...

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 sociopolitic...

Recent feminist analyses of power constitute a resource for theorizing power that archaeologists cannot afford to ignore given the importance of ‘post‐processual’ arguments that social relations, in which power is a central dimension, are as constitutive of system level dynamics as is the environment in which cultural systems are situated. I argue...

In the last few years, conference programs and publications have begun to appear that reflect a growing interest, among North American archaeologists, in research initiatives that focus on women and gender as subjects of investigation. One of the central questions raised by these developments has to do with their "objectivity" and that of archaeolo...

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 th...

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 litera...

The contributions to Testing Scientific Theories are unified by an interest 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 p...

Describes the Battered Women's Advocacy Clinic (BWAC) in Ontario, a noncrisis, nonresidential counseling service established in 1982. Research on the clientele indicates that traditional assumptions about the profile and nature of battered women (BW) need revision. The clients at BWAC resemble Canadian women in general. Given such representativenes...

In the past three decades scholars in virtually every humanistic and social scientific research discipline, and in some natural sciences (especially the life 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 identifyin...

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...