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Facts often acquire a life of their own; the stories in this book explain why. |
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Featuring contributions from the world’s leading experts on the subject and based partly on several detailed case studies, this volume is the first comprehensive analysis of the scientific notion of robustness as well as of the general ... |
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Thomas S. Kuhn's classic book is now available with a new index. |
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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 successes realized? What gives us confidence (...) |
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The vagaries of evidential reasoning in archaeology are notorious: the material traces that comprise the archaeological record are fragmentary and profoundly enigmatic, and the inferential gap that archaeologists must cross to constitute them as evidence of the cultural past is a perennial source of epistemic anxiety. And yet we know a great deal about the cultural past, including vast reaches of the past for which this material record is our only source of evidence. The contents of this record stand as (...) |
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Critics of Bayesianism often assert that scientists are not Bayesians. The widespread use of Bayesian statistics in the field of radiocarbon calibration is discussed in relation to this charge. This case study illustrates the willingness of scientists to use Bayesian statistics when the approach offers some advantage, while continuing to use orthodox methods in other contexts. The case of radiocarbon calibration, therefore, suggests a picture of statistical practice in science as eclectic and pragmatic rather than rigidly adhering to any one (...) |
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Critics of Bayesianism often assert that scientists are not Bayesians. The widespread use of Bayesian statistics in the field of radiocarbon calibration is discussed in relation to this charge. This case study illustrates the willingness of scientists to use Bayesian statistics when the approach offers some advantage, while continuing to use orthodox methods in other contexts. The case of radiocarbon calibration, therefore, suggests a picture of statistical practice in science as eclectic and pragmatic rather than rigidly adhering to any one (...) |
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In a formal theory of induction, inductive inferences are licensed by universal schemas. In a material theory of induction, inductive inferences are licensed by facts. With this change in the conception of the nature of induction, I argue that the celebrated “problem of induction” can no longer be set up and is thereby dissolved. Attempts to recreate the problem in the material theory of induction fail. They require relations of inductive support to conform to an unsustainable, hierarchical empiricism. |
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Contrary to formal theories of induction, I argue that there are no universal inductive inference schemas. The inductive inferences of science are grounded in matters of fact that hold only in particular domains, so that all inductive inference is local. Some are so localized as to defy familiar characterization. Since inductive inference schemas are underwritten by facts, we can assess and control the inductive risk taken in an induction by investigating the warrant for its underwriting facts. In learning more facts, (...) |
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Our epistemic access to the past is infamously patchy: historical information degrades and disappears and bygone eras are often beyond the reach of repeatable experiments. However, historical scientists have been remarkably successful at uncovering and explaining the past. I argue that part of this success is explained by the exploitation of dependencies between historical events, entities, and processes. For instance, if sauropod dinosaurs were hot blooded, they must have been gluttons; the high-energy demands of endothermy restrict sauropod grazing strategies. Understanding (...) |
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Experimental research is commonly held up as the paradigm of "good" science. Although experiment plays many roles in science, its classical role is testing hypotheses in controlled laboratory settings. Historical science is sometimes held to be inferior on the grounds that its hypothesis cannot be tested by controlled laboratory experiments. Using contemporary examples from diverse scientific disciplines, this paper explores differences in practice between historical and experimental research vis-à-vis the testing of hypotheses. It rejects the claim that historical research is (...) |
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One of Russell's most important and interesting books which reconciles the materialistic tendency of psychology with the anti-materialistic tendency of physics. |
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During the last two centuries, the way economic science is done has changed radically: it has become a social science based on mathematical models in place of words. This book describes and analyses that change - both historically and philosophically - using a series of case studies to illuminate the nature and the implications of these changes. It is not a technical book; it is written for the intelligent person who wants to understand how economics works from the inside out. (...) |
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How do archaeologists make effective use of physical traces and material culture as repositories of evidence? Material Evidence is a collection of 19 essays that take 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 (...) |
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This provocative introduction examines the most important new school of archaeological thought and practice to have emerged over the last two decades and provides students with an assessment of the impact and importance of recent theoretical debates. |
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One of Russell's most important and interesting books which reconciles the materialistic tendency of psychology with the anti-materialistic tendency of physics. |
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In this long-awaited compendium of new and newly revised essays, Alison Wylie explores how archaeologists know what they know. -/- Preprints available for download. Please see entry for specific article of interest. |
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one takes to be the most salient, any pair could be judged more similar to each other than to the third. Goodman uses this second problem to showthat there can be no context-free similarity metric, either in the trivial case or in a scientifically ... |
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"This volume emerged from workshops held at Pennsylvania State University in 2003 and Stanford University in 2005"--P. vii. |
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Scholars in diverse academic disciplines discuss the ways in which evidence is conceived, used, and manipulated in their own fields. They explore the possibilities for cross-disciplinary fertilisation and ask if it is possible or desirable to develop general multidisciplinary criteria and methods for studying and handling evidence. |
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This book presents the concept of “complementary science” which contributes to scientific knowledge through historical and philosophical investigations. It emphasizes the fact that many simple items of knowledge that we take for granted were actually spectacular achievements obtained only after a great deal of innovative thinking, painstaking experiments, bold conjectures, and serious controversies. Each chapter in the book consists of two parts: a narrative part that states the philosophical puzzle and gives a problem-centred narrative on the historical attempts to solve (...) |
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Scientists often make surprising claims about things that no one can observe. In physics, chemistry, and molecular biology, scientists can at least experiment on those unobservable entities, but what about researchers in fields such as paleobiology and geology who study prehistory, where no such experimentation is possible? Do scientists discover facts about the distant past or do they, in some sense, make prehistory? In this book Derek Turner argues that this problem has surprising and important consequences for the scientific realism (...) |
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How effectively communities of scientists come together and co-operate is crucial both to the quality of research outputs and to the extent to which such outputs integrate insights, data and methods from a variety of fields, laboratories and locations around the globe. This essay focuses on the ensemble of material and social conditions that makes it possible for a short-term collaboration, set up to accomplish a specific task, to give rise to relatively stable communities of researchers. We refer to these (...) |
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