ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the nature of theories within the social sciences in general, and in archaeology in particular. Difficulty in testing definitively specific high-level theories through clearly stated and evaluated hypotheses is one cause of this difference between the physical and social sciences. Thomas Kuhn received his PhD in physics but went on to make his major contributions to knowledge as a historian and philosopher of science. Archaeological theories, like all conceptual schemes in the social sciences, are difficult to test in ways that yield results accepted by the majority of researchers in the field. Social scientists, including archaeologists, deploy theories for many of the same reasons their colleagues in the physical sciences, such as chemistry and biology, do. Social scientists, however, face much greater problems defining their variables and testing causal relations among them than do practitioners of the physical sciences.
