As we have seen, most recent definitions of archaeology suggest that we can gain ‘knowledge’ of past societies by studying their material remains. During the 1960s and 1970s, the ‘new archaeologists’ were particularly concerned with the scientific credentials of archaeological knowledge. They urged archaeologists to adopt rigorous scientific methods of confirming hypotheses and explaining archaeological findings, and they turned to philosophers of science, especially C. G. Hempel, for explication of those methods. Their accounts of Hempel’s work and its relevance to archaeology attracted critical attention from philosophers as well as other archaeologists.
The philosophical problem of ‘confirmation’ concerns the relationship between evidence for some claim (the hypothesis) and the truth of that claim. New archaeologists criticized their colleagues for using ‘inductive methods’. By this they meant gathering data without any prior notion of what the data would reveal and then letting the data ‘speak for themselves’ to reveal patterns or generalizations. In contrast, the new archaeologists promoted using the ‘hypothetico-deductive’ method in which a hypothesis was stated and then tested on the basis of predictions that could be deduced from the hypothesis. If a prediction follows with certainty from the hypothesis, and is observed to be true, the hypothesis is confirmed; if the prediction turns out to be false, the hypothesis is disconfirmed.
In the ensuing discussions of the proposal to adopt the hypothetico-deductive model of confirmation, no one defended the crude version of inductivism that the new archaeologists rejected. However, critics did argue that the new archaeologists’ account of the method was oversimplified and that despite its ‘hypothetico-deductive’ name, the method depended on inductive reasoning. Critics pointed out that there were philosophical rivals to Hempel’s account of scientific confirmation, including Hempel’s own alternative accounts. Philosophers noted that philosophical models represent attempts by philosophers to analyze patterns of scientific reasoning rather than recipes to be followed for doing ‘real science’. Many archaeologists were already using more or less sophistical statistical reasoning to support their hypotheses. Such work, while scientifically sound, does not accord with the simple form of the hypothetico-deductive method. A version of a Bayesian model for confirmation was also suggested as a one that archaeologists might find useful as a tool for analyzing informal arguments of confirmation. That model allows for predictions to follow from hypotheses with probability rather than certainty, and supplements the core idea of the hypothetico-deductive model with considerations of ‘prior probabilities’. The prior probability of a hypothesis is the probability that it has before a particular test of it occurs. The prior probability could be based on several factors, including outcome of earlier tests of the hypothesis, the plausibility of any causal mechanisms involved in the hypothesis, the ‘fit’ of the hypothesis with already established theories, and so forth. Scientists routinely consider the prior probability of hypotheses to decide whether they are worth testing. Consideration of prior probabilities also offers a way to choose between different hypotheses that are equally supported by the same observational data. In such cases, the hypothesis that has the higher prior probability retains its relative ranking after the test. Few archaeologists are currently debating conflicting philosophical models of confirmation, though it is still an important issue for philosophers of science. While a better understanding of the philosophical issues involved in confirmation can increase understanding of how science works, it is also true that doing good science does not require adhering to a particular philosophical vision of confirmation.
World History
