Dispelling representation - mediation as recovery of realism in practice

There is an uneasiness that has spread throughout intellectual and cultural life. It affects almost every discipline and every aspect of our lives. This uneasiness is expressed by the opposition between objectivism and relativism, but there are a variety of other contrasts that indicate the same underlying anxiety: rationality versus irrationality, objectivity versus subjectivity, realism versus antirealism. Contemporary thinking has moved between these and other, related extremes. Even the attempts that some have made to break out of this framework of thinking have all too frequently been assimilated to these standard oppositions.

There are, however, many signs that the deep assumptions, commitments, and metaphors that have shaped these oppositions from which they gain their seductive power, are being called into question. For along with the disquietude that is provoked by these extremes, there is a growing sense that something is wrong with the ways in which the relevant issues and options are posed – a sense that something is happening that is changing the categorical structure and patterns within which we think and act – a sense that we have an urgent need to move beyond objectivism and relativism (Bernstein 1983:1-2).

Epistemology has failed archaeology. It has dispersed archaeology along a spectrum defined by worries of relativism and objectivism. My argument is that it is inadequate for internal and external reasons. It is incapable of adequately integrating the ‘external mandate’ to ethically integrate participation of heritage stakeholders who engage in an archaeological sensibility not confined to the particular (Western, scientific) values of objective representation via correspondence and coherence – epistemological concerns. Compounding this dilemma from within has been the failure of a more unified approach to explicit evaluation criteria advocated and the subsequent epistemic dispersion of the field. This opening of the discipline to alternate conceptions of the domain and subject side of the explanatory equation has lead to a hyperpluralism of approaches.

My thesis is as follows. Archaeology must reconfigure its relationship to the past without recourse to epistemology for justification of its knowledge. Counter-intuition, this non-epistemological project does not threaten to plunge the discipline into abject relativism. To the contrary, two inter-related moves must be made: a modernist epistemology must be replaced by an understanding of the non-issue of the perennial subject-object split which gives rise to epistemological squabbling. Dialectics is not enough. No a priori split should be assumed between people and things – necessitating their synthesis in dialects. Working equally in the trenches of the humanities-sciences wars, insights are available from science studies and Actor-Network-Theory. Moreover, utilizing ideas from science studies does not constitute a one-way, renewed importation; rather such ideas articulate and augment thinking already present within the discipline. Secondly, in lieu of epistemological justification some form of evaluation is still needed for knowledge claims. Otherwise we leave ourselves only with description as explanation. Again this will again draw from insights already present within the field and push them with a pragmatic tradition focused upon the value of practical consequence for the discipline and for larger society. These two tactics require thoroughgoing reconfiguration of how we think of ourselves as archaeologists, particularly how we justify our claims and authority. But it requires little in the way of reformulating how we practice. Good practice is already there, but it is hampered by a presumption of modernist epistemology.

With few notable exceptions, all of the aforementioned expressions of an archaeological epistemology have variously revolved around the notion of epistemic fit to the material past. In this concern with more accurate or more (self)critical or more nuanced representation of the past(s) variously conceived, archaeology has moved in a similar historical trajectory in the development of its theory and methodology to other natural and social sciences. Driven by ocular analogies, the pursuit of the ‘mirror of nature’ (cf. Rorty 1979) has involved the sciences in perennial questions of ‘representation and reality’ (cf. Putnam 1988). Philosophers of the sciences have characterized such inquiry as the summum bonnum of modernist epistemology. The reasoning and motivation is not misplaced: such a principle of representation grants evaluative capacity to knowledge claims. The better representations are judged to match, hook-up to or mirror an external reality, the closer such scientific models proximate the truth. Therefore, better representations may be evaluated by peers as evidently superior. Of course, there have risen a complex host of problems associated with such a simplistic one-to-one notion of representation, as well with consensus as how to judge such representation – through predictive success, instrumental efficacy (Hacking 1983), coherence to other representation judged successful by other established criterion, and so forth. Without delving into the interesting history of modernist notions of vision cum representation (eg. Berger 1984, Foucault 1990, Gombrich 1960) – a legacy owing much to our scientific canonization of Galileo and his ocular achievements - the critical issue in terms of epistemic solidarity has been the supposed settling-of-disputes power of knowledge conceived as seeing-it as-it-really-is. Unblemished and cleansed of distortions either on the part of theoretical conception or methodological apparatus, Nagel’s (1986:9) climb from outside of our minds to a ‘view from nowhere’ would enable knowing somewhere and something with confidence.

The problem is that such a conception of knowledge doesn’t work. Or, more specifically to what I will be arguing with regard to archaeology, knowledge claims do work, they act; they just don’t work by demonstrating any epistemic privilege to a supposed external and removed reality. This is not questioning reality. It simply questions a modern epistemological tradition which presumes an ontological rift between people and things, between internal minds and external reality. Bemoaning the ‘Cartesian split’ figures already in the archaeological literature, particularly those working from a phenomenological or embodied perspective (Thomas 1996, Tilley 1994). Moreover, as already discussed, Hodder and Shanks and Tilley both articulate the need to move beyond a disabling, dichotomous subject-object split (and Shanks and Hodder 1995:18-22). Such settlements nonetheless begin with an ‘and/both’ proposal, actuated through a dialectics of a series of distinct categories, such as past-present, subject-object, body-mind, interpreter-interpretant (eg. Shanks and Tilley 1992:120). Moving away from such splits, these archaeologists presciently advocated a questioning of the ‘common-science’ assumption of the Cartesian split and the recourse to epistemology to know when a credible account (subject side) is given for archaeological phenomena (object side). Shanks and Tilley (1992:66,112,244) most strongly articulate their dissatisfaction with such a ‘mirroring epistemology’ when they criticize correspondence theory, or how knowledge claims are judged truthful depending upon their verisimilitude as representation to external phenomena. Hodder (1999:200) likewise stresses in his hermeneutics the manner in which the gap between the subject pole and the object pole closes until both are fused in successful interpreting activity. Yet a construal of the inter-relatedness or synthesis of subject and object still presupposes and operationalizes the very opposing categories which it is supposed to overcome. Consequently, epistemology (whether of a coherence or correspondence variety as I argued previously) still raises its troublesome head in assessing how we can know and trust this inter-relationship. If subject and object was overcome, was truly a non-issue, there would no longer be a reason or purpose for epistemology. We would have no doubts about our statements representing ‘what is out there’. Ontology would do the work.

Within archaeology there is already present a definite dissatisfaction with epistemology as handed down to us by our modern progenitors. A movement away – towards alternate conceptions of it given by hermeneutics and dialectical thought – get us closer to dispelling the epistemological anxiety of the discipline. But to give it up completely? It seems to lie at the core of what we do, or at least authorizing what we do as a science. Notwithstanding these concerns, this is precisely what a confluence of scholars, working both on epistemology and scientific practice, have done.

Historicizing the ‘common science’ approach to knowledge as representation, one which, owing its origins in Aristotle’s De Anima and its subsequent reification by the Scholastics and finally Descartes, has become deeply rooted in our very capacity of perceiving the world, Hilary Putnam argues for abandoning it as an insuperable problem. “I see overcoming the traditional picture of perception – a picture according to which our sensations are as much an impassible barrier between ourselves and the objects we perceive as a mode of access to them – as absolutely necessary if philosophy is ever to stop ‘spinning its wheels’ in a vain attempt to find a resting place in the dispute about metaphysical realism and antirealism”. (Putnam 1998:38). Putnam emphasizes deep historical contingency for a view of perception that gives rise to two critical ideas informing representational accounts of knowledge: one is of intermediary sense-data between perceiver and world; the other is of passive receptivity, or a focus on reception as opposed to engagement. John Dewey first criticized the idea of passive knowledge as a receiving and not a doing in his ‘spectator theory of knowledge: “The theory of knowing is modeled after what was supposed to take place in the act of vision. The object is reflects light and is seen; it makes a difference to the eye and to the person having an optical apparatus, but none to the thing seen . . . a spectator theory of knowledge is the inevitable outcome” (Dewey 1929). More recently, Richard Rorty (1979) exhaustively traces this deeply rooted notion of ‘passive epistemology’ in the projects of Analytic Philosophy of the twentieth century. Taking form from the writings of Russell, Moore, the early Whitehead and Wittgenstein, and forcefully coalesced in the Vienna Circle’s program of Logical-Positivism, Analytic philosophy inherited this historical tradition of knowledge as accurately representing external reality by ‘hooking on the world’ and gave it is most influential and pervasive force (Stroll 2000). A progeny of the analytic philosophy, Richard Rorty summarizes its collective efforts in establishing this modernist epistemology as granting objectivity to statements about the world via a correspondence theory as inherently flawed. It is flawed because it unwittingly gives rise to the very problem it attempts to resolve, namely skeptical relativism, and because it has subsequently been incapable of dispelling epistemological uncertainty through proving the link between representations and reality. “The seventeenth century gave skepticism a new lease on life because of its epistemology. Any theory which views knowledge as accuracy of representation, and which holds that certainty can only be rationally had about representations, will make skepticism inevitable” (Rorty 1979:113).

Rorty draws in the fundamental criticism of modern epistemology put forward by Strawson and Quine. In his ‘myth of the given’, Strawson demonstrates that any semantic, representational relation to nonlinguistic objects cannot causally depend solely on experiential sensation, but depends also on prior representational conditioning to account for experiential objects (Sellars 1997[1956]:148). This neo-Kantian questioning of empiricism’s myth of experience having direct representational counterparts concluded that we are connected with the world causally but not representationally. In addition to Sellar’s well-known disabling of representational confidence, Quine’s (1994:ch.2) ‘two dogmas of empiricism’ established the underdetermination of knowledge claims to the world, and suggested instead of any privileged epistemological status, claims are made on pragmatic adjustment to entire (holistic) schemes of already held beliefs about the world (ibid: 46). Putnam echoes these irresolvable inadequacies of a representational epistemology when he says: “The idea that truth is a passive-copy of what is ‘really’ (mind-independently, discourse-independently) ‘there’ has collapsed under the critiques of Kant, Wittgenstein, and other philosophers even if it continues to have a deep hold on our thinking” (Putnam 1981:128). In concluding his review of the accumulation of destabilizing criticisms of representation accounts of knowledge claims, Rorty suggests that epistemology itself is a red-herring of historical making. “If we accept these criticisms, and therefore drop the notion of epistemology as the quest, initiated by Descartes, for those privilege items in the field of consciousness which are the touchstones of truth, we are in a position to ask whether there still remains something for epistemology to be. I want to urge that there does not” (1979:210).

Accustomed to epistemology providing a foundation or final arbiter for knowledge claims, Rorty’s self-described ‘anti-foundationalism’ has been derided as openly lapsing into relativism (contributions to Brandom 2000, Saatkamp 1995). But in enjoinder Rorty offers a positive account of knowledge, one not basing itself on the perpetual inability of epistemology to provide a ‘foundation’ for knowledge claims. He does this by drawing upon the causal enmeshment of knowledge and the world based upon practical activity. In doing so, he is joined by a host of other ‘neo-pragmatists’ who draw upon the original insights of the classical pragmatic thought of Dewey (esp. 1925, 1957[1920]), James (1978) and Peirce (1955). Specific conclusions drawn by the various ‘neo-pragmatists’ differ as they apply pragmatic principles to fields as diverse as legal adjudication (Grey 1998, Posner 1998), literary studies (Fish 1998), ethics and multiculturalism (Fesmire 2003, Gunn 2001, Lawson 2004), politics (Rorty 1999b, Stuhr 2000) and aesthetics (Carney 1998). As a general trait these pragmatists, such as Rorty, begin with the negative indictment of epistemology as a cul-de-sac – Putnam’s ‘spinning of the wheels’. They suggest that this because it is an (bad) abstraction of how people think (Menand 1997). In its place they go back to Dewey in stressing that thinking is not an exercise in pure contemplation to establish irrefutable foundations, but that it focuses upon practical problem solving. Aggregated under this banner, pragmatic thinkers consider as primary how we think, not what we think (ibid:xxvi). “It means that knowing is literally something which we do; that analysis is ultimately physical and active” (Dewey 1985:367). Peirce, the father of pragmatism, reoriented the identification of thought with practical activity when he identified objects with their practical consequences; with what they ‘do’. So from his example, attempting to irrefutable know whether a substance is ‘hard’ or not is a pointless exercise in traditional epistemology; there is no intrinsic essence which we must attempt to know. Rather, ‘hard’ is what all hard things do (Peirce 1955:31-2). James extrapolated Peirce’s semiotically limited ideas to knowledge in general, formulating his ‘principle of pragmatism’: “the true is the name for whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite and assignable reasons” (James 1978:42). Contrary to early criticisms of James which took his ‘will to believe’ to imply that we wishfully may discard epistemological reasoning so as to give credence to any fancy we wish to believe, James, an originator of strict realist thinking, underscored efficaciousness as the ‘definite and assignable reasons’. Given the handicap of a modernist epistemology which demands truth to equal certain knowledge of external phenomena, James turned the equation onto itself: what makes any knowledge claim or belief true if not our practical need in asking it? In other words, why do we even feel the impulse to need objective knowledge of reality if it is not the belief that in holding such ‘objective certainty’ we are lead into more useful relations with the world (Manand 1997). James pinpointed epistemic certainty as more foundationally embedded in a need to cope with experience from an inherent practical standpoint. “What is its cash-value in terms of practical experience? . . . our account of truth is an account of truths in the plural and having only this quality in common, that they pay. . . truth is made, just as health, wealth and strength are made, in the course of experience” (James 1978:122). Again, judged from within the historically reified tradition of modern epistemology, James was often mistaken for a forbear of contemporary ‘social constructivists’. But this is placing his statements of ‘belief’ and ‘made’ into the traditional equation of realism versus idealism, or objectivism versus relativism. The alternate maneuver around these debilitating dichotomies doesn’t draw upon the premises of either, viz. that objective statements mirror ‘how things are’ or subjective, contextual influence operates like a distorting lens on ‘how things really are’. Instead, James argues that health, or any other phenomenon or person, cannot be set aside as an isolated, definable ‘thing’ to be represented objectively; but only has significance through its relations to other phenomena in the process of negotiating experience for practical benefit. Those inclined to the traditional settlements may respond that such a non-foundational notion of ‘truth’ poses the dangerous consequences of discarding objectivity, truth and rationality. But as Menand 1997:xii) enjoins, such as response tends to (frustratingly) confirm the pragmatist key idea that “every account of the way people think is, at bottom, a support for those human goods the persons making the account believes to be important.”

A general outlook of practical efficacy already permeates the discipline of archaeology. While the various epistemic settlements already considered vary according to their proposals for negotiating relativism and objectivity, this pragmatic concern for practical effect underlies each outlook as a taken for granted background, common sense value. Shanks and Tilley highlight that “truth is a practical matter not an absolute”, and that, formulated within their epistemic framework “the relationship between theory and reality becomes one of utility” (1992:67,49, emphasis mine). Hodder (1999:61, emphasis mine) mentions how “other criteria that effect the success of archaeological theories include fruitfulness – how many new directions, new lines of inquiry, new perspectives are opened up.” And Binford (1989:43,23 emphasis mine), despite varying from Shanks, Tilley and Hodder in his adamant processualism, also stresses how “investigations in contemporary archaeology of the accuracy, utility, and relevance of basic propositions introduced in inferential argument are leading to a growth of our understanding of the archaeological record”. And that “new approaches come from new ideas. Their utility must be tested in the future, not by reference to old ideas or the credentials of their origins.” What a focus on pragmatic account of inquiry does is to pull these ancillary values of practical outcome to the forefront of attention as a principle sufficient enough to justify archaeological explanation. To remain locked within traditional epistemological concerns is to hamstring what is already present in these settlements to enable a bypassing of the revolving door of relativism-objectivity. Pragmatic thought often is derided as not providing a robust enough conceptualization and justification of inquiry (Menand 1997:intro.). Yet that is precisely its strength. It looks to how we already function on a more universal, everyday basis and reassures us that, stripped of abstract and arcane theorization, we already get-on in the world adequately with a pragmatic sensibility.

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Containments

Return to Trigger’s ‘moderate relativism’ as unification: pragmatic justification