philosophy of the historical sciences

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.

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

This paper advocates the reduction of the inference of common cause to that of common origins.  It distinguishes and subjects to critical analysis thirteen interpretations of “the inference of common cause” whose conclusions do not follow from their assumptions.  Instead, I introduce six types of inferences of common origins of information signals from their receivers to reduce, in the sense of supersede and replace, the thirteen inferences of common causes. I show how the paradigmatic examples of inferences of common cause, as well as a broader scope of inferences in the historical sciences, are better explained by inferences of origins.
Inferences of origins from information rich coherences between receivers of information signals both fit more closely and explain better the range of examples that have traditionally been associated with inferences of common causes, as well as a broader scope of examples from the historical sciences. Shannon’s concept of information as reduction in uncertainty, rather than physicalist concepts of information that relate it to entropy or waves, simplifies the inferences, preempts objections, and avoids the underdetermination of conclusions that challenge models of inferences of causes from information transmissions. 
In the second part of the paper I model inferences of information about common origins from information preserved in their receivers.  I distinguish information poor inferences that there were some common origins of receivers from the information richer inferences of ranges of possible common origins and the information transmission channels by which they transmitted signals to receivers.  Lastly and most information rich, I distinguish the inference of the defining properties of common origins.  The information transmission model from origins to receivers allows the reconceptualization of the concepts of independence as absence of intersections between information channels and reliability as the preservation of information from origins in receivers.  Finally, I show how inferences of origins form the epistemic basis of the historical sciences.

Material Evidence takes a resolutely case-based approach to this question, exploring instances of exemplary practice, key challenges, 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 detritus of everyday life and 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 evidenceand 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.

This article is a study of the role and use of evidence in the evaluation of claims in historical sciences. To do that, I develop a “snapshot” approach to Toulmin schemas. This framework is applied to the case of Archezoa, an initially supported then eventually rejected hypothesis in evolutionary biology. From this case study, I articulate a philosophical analysis which criticizes Cleland’s “smoking gun” account of the methodology of historical sciences. I argue that Toulmin schemas are conceptually precise tools that allow for the building of enriched reconstructions of evidential reasoning. It displays and suggests three ways in which the construction and use of facts in historical sciences is theory-laden. Despite its inherent limits, TS are heuristically useful tools to identify epistemic moves that could be further investigated. It also sheds light on the positive roles of speculation in historical sciences. Finally, I argue that it provides a context-specific and individuated understanding of hypothesis evaluation in historical sciences. Overall, I think the application of Toulmin schemas to cases of evidential reasoning in historical sciences is a promising descriptive and heuristic tool for philosophers of science.

The aim of this paper is to describe the method of causal explanation (or so-called “Covering Law Model”) as it was developed by Karl Popper with special regard to its application in historical sciences. For this reason, the subsequent exposition takes into account also the views of Carl Gustav Hempel who was the first one to transfer this method to the field of historical sciences. It is argued that this transfer is a particular demonstration of (predominantly a Neo-positivistic) tendency to formulate a general scientific method and, therefore, an attempt to put historiography into the same category as other sciences. It is also claimed that despite this general tendency, authors like Popper or Hempel probably realize, but do not stress explicitly, that the laws that are used in historical explanations are not of the same kind and do not have the same scientific quality as laws used so-called “hard” sciences like physics for example. The paper is concluded by a brief examination of Popper’s own application of this method in his historical research.