Alison Wylie

Alison Wylie is a Canadian feminist philosopher of science at the University of Washington, Seattle. In her own words, Wylie describes her interests in the following:

I work on epistemic questions raised by archaeological practice and by feminist research in the social sciences. In particular, I'm concerned with a cluster of problems to do with evidential reasoning and with ideals of objectivity that come into focus when we attend to the vagaries of inference from limited data, and to the role played by contextual values in the research process. For example, how do archaeologists establish knowledge claims about the social and cultural past, given their radically incomplete and enigmatic data base? And how should ideals of objectivity be defended or reformulated when it is recognized that explicitly partisan interests are by no means always or only a source of compromising bias, but sometimes play a crucial (corrective and productive) role in scientific inquiry? [1]

Wylie earned an MA in archaeology and PhD in Philosophy from SUNY Binghamton with a dissertation directed by Rom Harre. Before moving to the University of Washington she taught at Washington University in St. Louis, and in the women's studies department at Barnard College and the department of philosophy at Columbia University.

Selected bibliography

• Thinking From Things: Essays in the Philosophy of Archaeology, University of California Press, Berkeley CA, 2002).
• Feminist Science Studies, Special Issue of Hypatia, co-edited with Lynn Hankinson Nelson; Volume 19.2, Winter 2004.
• "Agnatology in/of Archaeology,” Agnatology: The Cultural Production of Ignorance, edited by Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger; Stanford University Press, forthcoming.
• “The Feminism Question in Science: What Does it Mean to ‘Do Social Science as a Feminist’?”, Handbook of Feminist Research, edited by Sharlene Hesse-Biber, Sage, in press.
• “Philosophy of Archaeology; Philosophy in Archaeology,” in The Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology, edited by Stephen Turner and Mark Risjord; volume 14, Handbook of the Philosophy of Science, Elsevier Science, in press.
• “Moderate Relativism, Political Objectivism,” in Contexts of Influence: Considering the Work of Bruce G. Trigger, edited by Ronald F. Williamson, McGill-Queens University Press, in press.
• “Socially Naturalized Norms of Epistemic Rationality: Aggregation and Deliberation,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 44 Supplement (2006): 43-48.
• "The Promise and Perils of an Ethic of Stewardship," Beyond Ethics: Anthropological Moralities on the Boundaries of the Public and the Professional, edited by Lynn Meskell and Peter Pells, Berg Press, London, 2005, pp. 47–68.
• “On Ethics,” in Handbook on Ethical Issues in Archaeology, edited by Larry Zimmerman, Karen D. Vitelli, and Julie Hollowell-Zimmer, Altamira Press, Walnut Creek CA, 2003, pp. 3–16.
• “Why Standpoint Matters,” in Science and Other Cultures: Issues in Philosophies of Science and Technology, edited by Robert Figueroa and Sandra Harding, Routledge, New York, 2003, pp. 26–48. Reprinted in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, edited by Sandra Harding, Routledge, New York, 2004, pp. 339–351.
• “Doing Social Science as a Feminist: The Engendering of Archaeology,” in Feminism in Twentieth Century Science, Technology, and Medicine, edited by Angela N. H. Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck, and Londa Schiebinger, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2001, pp. 23–45.
• “Feminism in Philosophy of Science: Making Sense of Contingency and Constraint,” in Companion to Feminism in Philosophy, edited by Miranda Fricker and Jennifer Hornsby, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 166–182.
• “Rethinking Unity as a Working Hypothesis for Philosophy of Science: How Archaeologists Exploit the Disunity of Science,” Perspectives on Science 7.3 (2000): 293-317.
• “Questions of Evidence, Legitimacy, and the (Dis)Unity of Science” American Antiquity 65.2 (2000): 227-237.

References

• Alison Wylie's homepage at the University of Washington (Seattle) - http://faculty.washington.edu/aw26/