Liberal Arts

The received theories of epistemology identify abductive inferences with the cognitive patterns of speculation (hypothesis formation) and insist that they cannot verify or confirm hypotheses. I criticize various descriptions of abduction, offer a structural analysis of abductive inferences, characterize abduction without alluding to its putative role in inquiry, and then demonstrate that some abductions do provide evidence and that not all scientific hypotheses derive from abductive inferences. This result challenges those notions of scientific knowledge that dismiss some central scientific ideas (for example, evolution) as 'metaphysical research programs' or 'just theories' when they are instead well substantiated by abductive evidence.

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This essay explores four “big ideas” that swept across the southwest borderlands of North America in the thousand years that span the emergence of social complexity in the ancestral Puebloan world and the consolidation of the Spanish colony of New Mexico in the early eighteenth century, AD 700 to 1700.  The Chaco Phenomenon, the Katsina Religion, Franciscan Catholicism, and Po’pay’s (Pueblo) Revolt each sought, through evangelical methods, to effect a dynamic reorganization of popular religious, cultural, and political beliefs. And each provoked popular resistance or rebellions in which power relations between women and men proved meaningful.  The legacy of their successes and failures continue to resonate in the regional peoples’ memories and lifeways. Cycles of social complexity and disintegration, often attributed to ecological fluctuations, show evidence of tensions among women and men over their respective places in Pueblo socio-religious expression.  Intensification of social complexity among pre-contact Puebloans, as in the rise of the Chaco Phenomenon and the spread of the Katsina religion, often entailed some variety of women’s disenfranchisement from social and ceremonial life.  The advent of Franciscan Catholicism provided descendants of these women new avenues for exploring and expressing social and spiritual power, seldom in complete adherence to orthodox Catholicism, but in forms of experimental piety that resonated with women’s experience.

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