sey075

I am unable to upload the new published version of a paper to Academia.edu. They don't answer my email queries (after I spent a lot of time trying to find their email question system), so I don't know the source of the problem. Maybe it is their new page style, which I dislike. I uploaded a dummy paper just fine, but when I tried to "edit" it and change the attached file, it stalled, just as with my other paper. The paper I was trying to post is: Smith, Michael E.2015    How can Archaeologists Make Better Arguments? The SAA Archaeological Record 15 (4): 18-23. I had a draft version posted. I managed to delete the file somehow (in preparation for uploading the published reprint), but when I try to upload the new file, the site does not respond. I've tried it from different computers, over the past week. Nothing doing. Is Academia.edu unaware of the problem, or do they know about it but just not bothering to tell anybody? Neither is an attractive possibility. I stop...

I can't find enough good epistemological work on comparative scientific archaeology, so I have to get my kicks elsewhere. I just read a fantastic paper by a sociologist, titled "F*ck Nuance." (thank you to Colin Wren for sending me a link). The author is Kieran Healy, a sociologist at Duke University. His basic point is that when someone calls for more nuance, the result is typically the complexification of ideas and theory to the point where theorizing and comparative analysis suffers. Comparison requires simplification ("abstraction" to Healy), and this is prevented by nuance.       “Nuance is not a virtue of good sociological theory. Sociologists typically use it as a term of praise, and almost without exception when nuance i mentioned it is because someone is asking for more of it. I shall argue that, for the problems facing sociology at present, demanding more nuance typically obstructs the development of theory that in intellectually interesting, empiric...