Reliance on analogy, especially ethnographic analogy, is as contentious in archaeology as it is ubiquitous, and it is once again the centre of sharp controversy about disciplinary ambitions, epistemic identity, and norms of credible practice. What basis can there be, ask contemporary critics of analogy-gone-wrong, for projecting Malagasy cultural meanings onto Stonehenge, or Big Man models of colonial era leadership in Melanesia onto the European Neolithic?
 

These figure as negative object lessons that are understood to demonstrate, yet again, the “vulnerability of analogy,” raising anew the question of whether the hope for an analogy-free archaeology, a defining commitment of the New Archaeology, can ever be realized. I argue not, but do not see this as a counsel of epistemic despair or warrant for speculation. Rather than indicting analogical inference as a whole, recent critiques illustrate a number of strategies for making judicious use of analogical inference which converge, at key points, on philosophical analyses of productive analogical reasoning in fields as diverse physics and chemistry, evolutionary biology and genetics.
 

Professor Wylie will offer a constructive account of social/cognitive norms of practice by which archaeologists can (and often do) circumscribe, the empirical and inferential vulnerability of analogical reasoning about the cultural past.
 

Alison Wylie is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Washington. She gained her first degree in Philosophy and Sociology at Mount Allison University, going on to postgraduate studies at the State University of New York and Oxford, where she gained her doctorate. She was awarded the Presidential Award from the Society for American Archaeology in 1995 and appointed Distinguished Lecturer by the American Anthropological Association in 2008. Alison’s main research interests lie in the philosophy of the social and historical sciences, and feminist philosophy of science.
 

The Mulvaney Lecture is held biennially to honour Professor John Mulvaney, Foundation Professor of
Prehistory in the Faculty of Arts.

For further information, contact: Tanya Greig