In his attack on relativism and constructionism, Fear of Knowledge, Boghossian (2006) takes as his point of departure a 1996 New York Times news story about a conflict between Native Americans and archaeologists in which indigenous beliefs about tribal origins, rooted in oral history, are pitted against conclusions drawn from scientific investigation of the archaeological record. The archaeologists in the story are described as capitulating to a misguided postmodern relativism; they are in the grip of what Boghossian calls the “doctrine of equal validity.” Boghossian’s mission is to counter this doctrine in all its forms and, in the process, he rejects epistemic pluralism as irredeemably incoherent.

Boghossian’s position is a particularly stark example of an “anxious [philosophical] nightmare,” as Alan Richardson describes it, in which any challenge to epistemic foundationalism must entail radical incommensurability, the threat of mutual incomprehensibility. I am interested, not so much in the internal incongruities of such a position, but in what it obscures. If we take as our starting point the practices by which divergent norms and belief systems are negotiated in the context of an active research program, the epistemic picture that emerges is not only more nuanced and complicated but also less liable to the threat of relativism that is the stuff of philosophical nightmares. I focus here on examples of collaboration between archaeologists and descendant communities that are epistemically productive in ways that are systematically obscured by the sharply drawn conflicts retailed in headline news and in Fear of Knowledge. I focus on the question, what conditions that foster transformative criticism in well established, productive traditions of empirical research? And I argue that the mobilization of diverse social/epistemic standpoints is crucial, and must extend to forms of expertise that lie outside the research community.