Alison Wylie, "Evidential reasoning: experimental archaeology and archaeological modeling"
On the face of it archaeology is a paradigmatically non-experimental science. And yet archaeologists make
extensive use of experimentally derived results in building and assessing models of past cultural events,
lifeways, and cultural processes; this includes results generated by a robust tradition of "experimental
archaeology." I distinguish, by specificity and representational function, several different types of
archaeological models and consider the uses archaeologists make of factual, causal and, crucially,
counterfactual background knowledge in constructing these models, assessing their initial plausibility,
and testing them archaeologically.
Seppo Poutanen, "Critical Realism and Post-Structuralist Feminism -- The Difficult Path to Mutual Understanding"
Tony Lawson, Sandra Harding, Drucilla K. Barker, Fabienne Peter and Julie A. Nelson have recently debated
the merits and demerits of critical realism as the basis of feminist social research. Yet the dialogue is
left unfinished, with no clear agreement attained. Some key features of that failure are analysed in this
article. It is suggested that, despite shared support for explicitly post-positivistic stances,
critical realists and poststructuralist feminists cannot gain much from a dialogue that proceeds like this one.
Other modes of discussion should be looked for. One more promising basis for such discussion --
a question-driven approach to social scientific explanation -- is introduced at the end of the article.