Alison Wylie

University of British Columbia, Philosophy, Faculty Member

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Papers by Alison Wylie

Philosophy of the Field, in the Field: Philosophy of Science Association 2020/2021 Presidential Address

Philosophy of Science

Recent advocates of “field philosophy” make the case that philosophy “needs to get outside more o... more 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 consequential in real-world, practical terms. This takes a number of different forms, many of them captured by a framework for analyzing engaged philosophy of science proposed by Plaisance and Elliott. I draw on three examples of field-engaged philosophy of science that address the legacies of settler-colonialism archaeology to illustrate the promise of field philosophy.

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Feminism in philosophy of science

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Dec 12, 2008

Archaeology, philosophy of

Routledge eBooks, Sep 11, 2018

Questions about the scientific status of archaeology have been central to field-defining debates ... more Questions about the scientific status of archaeology have been central to field-defining debates since the late nineteenth century and have frequently involved appeals to philosophical sources. With the possible exception of Collingwood, however, there was little systematic exploration of the bearing of philosophical literature on these questions until the advent, in the 1960s and 1970s, of the New Archaeology, a self-consciously positivist research programme. The New Archaeology originated in North America but has been widely influential, especially in giving prominence to philosophical and theoretical issues. The New Archaeologists’ advocacy of a positivist (Hempelian) conception of scientific goals and practice provoked intense debate which involved philosophers of science as well as archaeologists from the early 1970s. Although the positivist commitments of the programme were widely repudiated a decade later, philosophical exchange has continued and expanded to include consideration of a range of post-positivist models of scientific inference that emphasize the theory-ladeness of archaeological evidence, as well as hermeneutic and post-structuralist models of archaeological interpretation. The analysis of epistemological issues is also closely tied to foundational questions about how the cultural subject of archaeological inquiry should be conceptualized and has led, increasingly, to a consideration of normative questions about the values and interests that shape archaeological research and the ethical responsibilities of practitioners. In 1992 Embree argued that work in this area had achieved sufficient maturity to be recognized as a subfield which he designated ‘meta-archaeology’.

Part Two. How New Is the New Archaeology, and Other Historical Essays

Arguments for Scientific Realism: The Ascending Spiral

American Philosophical Quarterly, 1986

ALTHOUGH I have little sympathy for **> Nagel's instrumentalism, his "dictum" o... more 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."1 The reason for this, however, ...

Ethics in American Archaeology

Critical Distance: Stabilising Evidential Claims in Archaeology

British Academy eBooks, Dec 1, 2011

This chapter adopts a philosophical perspective on evidential reasoning in archaeology. It argues... more 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 confirmatory power of epistemically independent lines of evidence. The chapter outlines a model of evidential reasoning based on archaeological practice that integrates insights drawn from philosophical theories of confirmation, model building, and hypothesis testing. Given growing interest in the uses of material evidence in fields that had been resolutely text-based, the archaeological principles of evidential reasoning may have much wider reach than this particular social/historical discipline.

Moderate Relativism/Political Objectivism

McGill-Queen's University Press eBooks, Aug 24, 2006

Jay F. Rosenberg One World and Our Knowledge of It (Boston: D. Reidel1981)

Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Jun 1, 1983

Rosenberg is exceedingly candid in his own reflections on One World. With respect to style, he wa... more Rosenberg is exceedingly candid in his own reflections on One World. With respect to style, he warns the reader at the outset that One World is extremely difficult reading and, in conclusion, he observes that despite 'several hundred pages of close argumentation,' the position he develops is 'likely to satisfy neither the Transcendental Idealist nor the Criteriological Realist' (188), the two major classes of opponent he is concerned to address. But then, he makes it clear that in his eyes it is no real measure of the quality or importance of a work in philosophy that it should fail to be readable or polemically compelling. Any extended philosophical analysis should be viewed as 'one long story' whose purpose is to provide a way of drawing together the threads of conceptual argument in its subject area in such a way that a comprehensive new synthesis emerges one which supersedes competing attempts at synthesis in providing a 'better story';

Introduction: Doing Archaeology as a Feminist

Gender research archaeology has made significant contributions, but its dissociation from the res... more 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 guidelines for "doing science as a feminist" that have taken shape in the context of the long running "feminist method debate" in the social sciences. There is now a rich and expansive body of archaeological research on women and gender, a dramatic development in less than two decades. But despite taking shape at a point when vigorous traditions of feminist research were already well established in socio-cultural anthropology, history, and geography, among other closely aligned fields, the feminist affiliations of "gender archaeology" have always been vexed. Hanen and Kelley (1992) noted, with some surprise, a dearth of feminist content in the abstracts submitted for the first public North American conference on "The Archaeology of Gender," the 1989 Chacmool Conference (Walde and Willows 1991). They found that 80% of contributors avoided the use of terms such as feminist or feminism, and few made any reference to feminist literature, authors, influences, or ideas (1992: 198). When I undertook a survey of Chacmool contributors in 1990-1991, I learned that this accurately reflected the self-reported familiarity of most participants with feminist research in other fields and with feminist activism; although a majority said they had a pre-existing interest in research on gender, barely half identified as feminists and many registered strong reservations about the label (Wylie 1992,1997: 94-95). Conkey and Gero (1997) have since argued that this dissociation from feminist scholarship and politics continues to characterize archaeological research in the "gender genre."

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Re-Constructing Archaeology

International Studies in Philosophy, 1992

The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England 1838-1886. Philippa LevineScience Encounters the Indian, 1820-1880: The Early Years of American Ethnology. Robert E. Bieder

Philosophy of Science, Sep 1, 1990

The constitution of archaeological evidence: Gender politics and science

A proliferation of new archaeologies: “Beyond objectivism and relativism”

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Jul 22, 1993

A proliferation of new archaeologies:" Beyond objectivism and relativism' ALISON WYLIE ... more

Ethical Dilemmas in Archaeological Practice: Looting, Repatriation, Stewardship, and the (Trans)formation of Disciplinary Identity

Perspectives on Science, 1996

North American archaeologists have long defined their ethical responsibilities in terms of a comm... more 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 are not served by scientific exploitation of the record. I offer an analysis of issues having to do with the identity of archaeology that underlie this debate and outline one strategy of response now emerging.

Special Issue: Selected Papers from the ENPOSS Meeting, Venice, 3-4 September 2013

David Thomas., Naturalism and Social Science: A Post-Empiricist Philosophy of Social Science

International Studies in Philosophy, 1982

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Feminism and social science

Routledge eBooks, Sep 11, 2018

<jats:p>Feminists have two sorts of interest in the social sciences. With the advent of the... more <jats:p>Feminists have two sorts of interest in the social sciences. With the advent of the second-wave women's movement, they developed wide-ranging critiques of gender bias in the conceptual framework and methodology, as well as in the goals, institutions and practice of virtually all the social sciences; they argue that the social sciences both reflect and contribute to the sexism of the larger societies in which they are embedded. Alongside these critiques feminist practitioners have established constructive programmes of research that are intended to rectify the inadequacies of existing traditions of research and to address questions of concern to women. In this they are committed both to improving the disciplines in which they participate and to establishing a sound empirical and theoretical basis for feminist activism. This engagement of feminists with social science, as commentators and practitioners, raises a number of philosophical issues that have been addressed by feminist social scientists and philosophers. These include questions about ideals of objectivity and the role of contextual values in social scientific inquiry, the goals of feminist research, the forms of practice appropriate to these goals, and the responsibilities of feminist researchers to the subjects of inquiry and to those who may otherwise be affected by its conduct or results.</jats:p>

Bearing witness

Routledge eBooks, Nov 29, 2020

The Feminism Question in Science: What Does It Mean to “Do Social Science as a Feminist”?

SAGE Publications, Inc. eBooks, 2012

Philosophy of the Field, in the Field: Philosophy of Science Association 2020/2021 Presidential Address

Philosophy of Science

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Feminism in philosophy of science

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Dec 12, 2008

Archaeology, philosophy of

Routledge eBooks, Sep 11, 2018

Part Two. How New Is the New Archaeology, and Other Historical Essays

Arguments for Scientific Realism: The Ascending Spiral

American Philosophical Quarterly, 1986

Ethics in American Archaeology

Critical Distance: Stabilising Evidential Claims in Archaeology

British Academy eBooks, Dec 1, 2011

Moderate Relativism/Political Objectivism

McGill-Queen's University Press eBooks, Aug 24, 2006

Jay F. Rosenberg One World and Our Knowledge of It (Boston: D. Reidel1981)

Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Jun 1, 1983

Introduction: Doing Archaeology as a Feminist

Download

Re-Constructing Archaeology

International Studies in Philosophy, 1992

Philosophy of Science, Sep 1, 1990

The constitution of archaeological evidence: Gender politics and science

A proliferation of new archaeologies: “Beyond objectivism and relativism”

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Jul 22, 1993

A proliferation of new archaeologies:" Beyond objectivism and relativism' ALISON WYLIE ... more

Ethical Dilemmas in Archaeological Practice: Looting, Repatriation, Stewardship, and the (Trans)formation of Disciplinary Identity

Perspectives on Science, 1996

Special Issue: Selected Papers from the ENPOSS Meeting, Venice, 3-4 September 2013

David Thomas., Naturalism and Social Science: A Post-Empiricist Philosophy of Social Science

International Studies in Philosophy, 1982

Download

Feminism and social science

Routledge eBooks, Sep 11, 2018

Bearing witness

Routledge eBooks, Nov 29, 2020

The Feminism Question in Science: What Does It Mean to “Do Social Science as a Feminist”?

SAGE Publications, Inc. eBooks, 2012

Interdisciplinary Practice: An Interview with Alison Wylie

Archaeology in the Making: Conversations Through a Discipline, edited by William Rathje, Michael Shanks, Timothy Webmoor, and Christopher Witmore, Routledge, 2013

In commenting on the state of affairs in contemporary archaeology, Wylie outlines an agenda for a... more

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"Legacies of Collaboration: Transformative Criticism in Archaeology,” 2008 Patty Jo Watson Distinguished Lecture, Archaeology Division, American Anthropological Association (San Francisco, November 2008)

Demands for accountability are transforming archaeology: accountability to descendant communities... more 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 challenges are anxieties about the costs of response to them: research opportunities lost, credibility eroded, professional autonomy compromised by legal constraints and by intractable conflicts among stakeholders. All too often this obscures local initiatives that illustrate what becomes possible when practice is reconceptualized as a form of intellectual and cultural collaboration. While moral, political, and legal commitments are typically the primary motivation for these partnerships, the archaeologists involved also describe innumerable ways in which their research has been enriched, empirically and conceptually, by extra-disciplinary collaborations; the impact of and justification for such practice is as much epistemic as normative. I articulate an epistemic rationale for community based collaborative practice in archaeology that is grounded in core scientific norms of critical engagement. Acknowledgements It is a particular honor to give the 2008 AAA-AD Distinguished Lecture, this being the first year it has been designated the Patty Jo Watson Distinguished Lecture. Patty Jo has been an extraordinary mentor, and is a model of generosity in collaboration of all kinds. I am most grateful to the AAA-AD executive for their invitation to give this lecture, and warmly endorse their dedication of this lecture series to Patty Jo.

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Pornography Embodied, Joan Mason-Grant, In Memoriam, Hypatia 26.1(2011): 130-131

Hypatia, 2011

As both a scholar and an activist, Joan Mason-Grant was centrally concerned with what she took to... more As both a scholar and an activist, Joan Mason-Grant was centrally concerned with what she took to be the promise and the pitfalls of the Dworkin-MacKinnon approach to understanding and combating the harms of pornography. Crucial insights about how to reframe our thinking about pornography had been submerged, she argued, in debate generated by the 1982 Minneapolis Civil Rights Ordinance that kept our attention focused on questions about the nature of speech and legal strategies for its regulation or protection. In Pornography Embodied: From Speech to Sexual Practice, Joan urged that we return to Dworkin and MacKinnon's central, innovative insight: " that pornography is not merely the representation or expression of ideas—that is, 'speech'—but a material practice of subordination " (Mason-Grant 2004, 2). Although the tools of speech-act theory carry this line of argument some distance forward, she made the case that these are fundamentally limited and limiting; they serve, ultimately, to codify a conceptualization of pornography as speech and to reaffirm a reductive legal framing of the issues. What we need, she argued, is a nuanced understanding of how the social meanings and values of pornography are enacted and become quite literally embodied in everyday practice—not just communicated as words and pictures, with (or without) illocutionary force. The philosophical account Joan offered in Pornography Embodied is a theory of sexual practice and performance, a theory that captures the ways in which routinized, normalized uses of pornography actively constitute forms of social agency and sexual competence. This marks a conceptual shift that has profound practical as well as philosophical implications; rather than pressing for (or resisting) legislation, it redirects our energies to interventions that bring to awareness, and that disrupt, the submerged politics of seemingly natural forms of sexual know-how and desire. Joan's philosophy was always engaged.

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Thinking from Things: Essays in the Philosophy of Archaeology

University of California Press, 2002

Despite its labor-intensive preoccupation with the physical remains of past cultures, archaeology... more Despite its labor-intensive preoccupation with the physical remains of past cultures, archaeology is a deeply philosophical discipline. In this compendium of new and newly revised essays, Wylie explores the question of how archaeologists know what they know. Examining the history and methodology of Anglo-American archaeology, she puts the tumultuous debates of the last thirty years in historical and philosophical perspective. She unearths the assumptions that underlie the positivist, processualist program of the New Archaeologists and their antithesis, the premises behind the post-processual archaeology of the 1980s and 1990s. This leads her to suggest ways in which a partial reconciliation can be reached between these distinct camps. In the process, she offers a new, constructive answer to the question of whether archaeology can claim be an objective science exploring ways in which, although archaeological data are fragmentary and ephemeral, they offer a record of human history that can challenge our most deeply held convictions about the cultural past. The essays included in Thinking from Things also address ethical issues and examine the epistemic implications of the emerging " gender archaeology " research program.

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Evidential Reasoning in Archaeology

How do archaeologists work with the material traces they identify as a record of the cultural pas... more How do archaeologists work with the material traces they identify as a record of the cultural past? How are these data collected and how are they construed as evidence? What is the impact on archaeological practice of new techniques of data recovery and analysis (especially those that originate in the physical and life sciences)? How do archaeologists work with old evidence in pursuit of new interpretations, and how do they adjudicate conflicting evidential claims based on the same or overlapping bodies of data?

To answer these questions, the authors of this book identify key examples of evidential reasoning in archaeology that are widely regarded as successful, as pivotal to the development of the field, or as instructive failures, and build nuanced analyses of the forms of reasoning they exemplify. This case-based approach is predicated on a conviction that archaeological practice is a repository of considerable methodological wisdom, embodied in tacit norms and skilled expertise; it is rarely made explicit, except when contested, and has been largely obscured by the abstractions of high profile crisis debates. Evidential Reasoning in Archaeology captures this wisdom in a set of close-to-ground principles of best practice.

Contents

Introduction: The Paradox of Material Evidence
Chapter 1: Archaeological Evidence in Question: Working between the Horns of a Dilemma
Chapter 2: Archaeological Fieldwork: Scaffolding in Practice
Chapter 3: Working with Old Evidence
Chapter 4: External Resources: Archaeology as a Trading Zone
Conclusions: Reflexivity Made Concrete

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Material Evidence: Learning From Archaeological Practice

How do archaeologists make effective use of physical traces and material culture as repositories ... more How do archaeologists make effective use of physical traces and material culture as repositories of evidence? Material Evidence takes 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. Archaeologists make compelling use of an enormously diverse range of material evidence, from garbage dumps to monuments, from finely crafted artifacts rich with cultural significance to the inadvertent transformation of landscapes over the long term.

Each contributor to Material Evidence identifies a particular type of evidence with which they grapple and considers, with reference to concrete examples, how archaeologists construct evidential claims, critically assess them, and bring them to bear on pivotal questions about the cultural past. Historians, cultural anthropologists, philosophers, and science studies scholars are increasingly interested in working with material "things" as objects of inquiry and as evidence – and they acknowledge on all sides just how challenging this is. One of the central messages of the book is that close analysis of archaeological best practice can yield constructive guidelines for practice that have much to offer practitioners within archaeology and well beyond.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

1. Material Evidence: Learning from Archaeological Practice
Alison Wylie and Robert Chapman

Part I. Fieldwork and Recording Conventions

2. Repeating the Unrepeatable Experiment
Richard Bradley

3. Experimental Archaeology at the Cross Roads: A Contribution to Interpretation or Evidence of ‘Xeroxing’?
Martin Bell

4. ‘Proportional Representation’: Multiple voices in Archaeological Interpretation at Çatalhöyük
Shahina Farid

5. Integrating Database Design and Use into Recording Methodologies
Michael J. Rains

6. The Tyranny of Typologies: Evidential Reasoning in Romano-Egyptian Domestic Archaeology
Anna Lucille Boozer

Part II. Cross-field trade: Archaeological applications of external expertise and technologies

7. The Archaeological Bazaar: Scientific Methods for Sale? Or: ‘Putting the ‘Arch-’ Back into Archaeometry’
A. M. Pollard and P. Bray

8. Radiocarbon Dating and Archaeology: History, Progress and Present Status
Sturt W. Manning

9. Using Evidence from Natural Sciences in Archaeology
David Killick

10. Working the Digital: Some Thoughts from Landscape Archaeology
Marcos Llobera

11. Crafting Knowledge with (Digital) Visual Media in Archaeology
Sara Perry

Part III. Multiple working hypotheses, strategies of elimination, and triangulation

12. Uncertain on Principle: Combining Lines of Archaeological Evidence to Create Chronologies
Alex Bayliss and Alasdair Whittle

13. Lessons from Modelling Neolithic Farming Practice: Methods of Elimination
Amy Bogaard

14. Evidence, Archaeology and Law: An initial Exploration
Roger M. Thomas

15. Law and Archaeology: Modified Wigmorean Analysis
Terence Anderson and William Twining

16. Traditional Knowledge, Archaeological Evidence, and Other Ways of Knowing
George Nicholas and Nola Markey

Part IV: Broader perspectives: Material Culture as Object and Evidence

17. Evidence of What? On the Possibilities of Archaeological Interpretation
Gavin Lucas

18. Meeting Pasts Halfway: A Consideration of the Ontology of Material Evidence in Archaeology
Andrew Meirion Jones

19. Matter and Facts: Material Culture and the History of Science
Simon Werrett

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