The preparation of discussion questions is an important part of the course. Each of you needs to do it. The questions are your opportunity to enlist your colleagues's and my help in clarifying the arguments in the stuff we read and then going on to evaluate them. The more effort you put into thinking the about reading and asking questions that will help you understand what's going on, the more you are going to get out of the course. I am very much interested in making sure that BOTH clarification and evaluation occur, with clarification coming first.

Some of you seemed to be puzzled about the role and utility of Kosso's book. Kosso offers a post-positivist, or critical-realist account of the enterprise we call science and just what is about scientific claims that renders them credible and yet always -- to varying degrees -- open to revision. He has some useful things so say about

• How inference (to the best explanation) works in archaeology and elsewhere.
• What makes some inferences more believable than others.
• The sense in which objectivity is possible, once we realize that empiricism is magical thinking.
• What moves we can and should make when our inferences fail to work out initially (what do the the orbit of Uranus and the increase quality of tribute cloth have in common?).
• The fundamental role of theory in the whole process.

You need to be working toward your own account of these issues. It does not have to be Kosso's. But in your papers, you should be able to discuss intelligently these issues and the way in which they emerge in the archaeological case studies that compris e the bulk of the reading for the course. Getting clear in the issues raised by Kosso is fundamental to evaluating the stories archaeologists tell about the stuff they dig up and the theoretical tools they use to tell the stories.

If everyone is happy with their grasp of these issues, that's great. But if not, let me know and we can devote the first 15 or 20 minutes of class next week trying to sort them out, before we move on to consider, among other things, another issue that we nudged gently against last time: the extent to which we can or should use the same inferential process when we move from planets to people.