Epistemic Settlements: 'relative objectivity'

While these two poles or ‘horns’ of the interpretive dilemma define the entire spectrum of epistemological commitments currently advocated in the discipline, the particular positions advocated by archaeologists engaged in these debates disperse into heterogeneous ‘solutions’. Admitting the veracity of post-positivist arguments for paradigm dependence, Binford sketched how such theory-ladeness perforce closes down the option of the ‘traditional’ archaeologist to demure from ‘theory-building’. Invoking the analysis of Kuhn, Binford argued against the conservative position of the dilemma adopted by traditional archaeologists. This consisted in their paradigmatic adherence to both empiricism and a normative view of culture – whereby culture, as influentially expounded by Tylor (Tylor 1881), is an ideational phenomenon which must be indirectly inferred from the material products objectifying these beliefs and values. In his building of a systematic archaeology capable of establishing the causal factors responsible for past cultural life, he insisted upon the alternate conceptualization of culture as an ‘extra-somatic’ means of adaptation (Binford 1962). Yet, as Wylie (2002:121) has pointed out, this move to affirm the limitations of one paradigm bound concept of culture was not accompanied by an acknowledgment of his adoption of another paradigm bound concept of culture – one amenable to materialistic considerations of its causal determinacy. This inconsistency seems to have been part of Binford’s complex maneuvering between these two poles of the dilemma. While paradigmatic contextualism was acknowledged, he argued that the full-blown implications of paradigm dependence were a ‘red-hearing’ (Binford and Sabloff 1982, 1989: 33-4). He argues for this middle ground of the dilemma by distinguishing between “first order observation” and “pattern recognition work” (Binford 1989:35). First order observations of the archaeological record are paradigm dependent. An informing paradigm (such as the concept of culture brought to bear) does indeed influence the researcher as “the choice of properties . . . to be observed is justified by virtue of being potentially germane with reference to what one thinks one knows about the world” (ibid.). However, at the next stage in reasoning where generalization regarding the initial observations are made, theory ladeness is shed: “These generalized data are not in any sense paradigm-dependent (ibid., italics original, Binford 1982a:128). Binford argues this is so because generalizations derive not directly from the first order observations, but from organizing the data with explicit, reproducible procedures. As these procedures allow others “to look at the world from the same glasses”, they are objective statements Figure 3.1.

Figure 3.1: Binford’s two-phase account of objectivity

This is particularly the case when the first order observations are organized by measurement (such as radiocarbon dating). When these non-paradigm dependent procedures are adhered to, patterns in the data begin to emerge which suggest relationships. This “pattern recognition work”, stressing inter-relationships among the measured first order observations, is emphatically not theory-dependent, for it is here where “nature gets a chance to talk back” to our ideas (ibid.). But to thread the middle of the dilemma by accepting a limited form of theory ladeness, Binford relies upon transforming the potentially biased, first order observations into the bio-physical data amenable to quantifiable measurements of pattern recognition work. Such a restriction may place ‘low level’ interpretations of the archaeological record – those corresponding to his ‘technomic’ categorization of cultural complexity – on firm evaluative ground. But then, contra his aspirations of new archaeology explaining the ‘higher level’ cultural processes – his ‘sociotechnic’ and ‘ideotechnic’ realms – his informing paradigm of eco-materialism restricts secure evaluation to quantifiable, bio-physical data relating to the lower rung of Hawkes’ ladder of inference (Binford 1962). This evidential limitation of his positivist derived epistemology, coupled with the inconsistency noted by Wylie with respect to his own unacknowledged paradigm dependent concept of culture, opens his explicit reasoning to the extensive criticisms leveled by anti-processualist thinkers (eg. Hodder 1982, 1984, Shanks and Tilley 1987a: ch.2) and renders his epistemological conclusion of ‘relative objectivity’ insecure or at best limited in its application to the domain of archaeology.

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Containments

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