In his initial essay, Steve mentions several factors that are used to make attribution estimates. They are "layout, motifs, palette and structure."

But the factor of "weave pattern" to which we drew attention in a recent salon http://www.turkotek.com/salon_00065/salon.html is not included.

Poor Neff and Maggs.

They're never going to get folks to see the merit of an argument that is as plain as the "nose on your face."

The pain they must feel, to have made an argument that should at least get "weave pattern" "in the door," so to speak, of the lists of factors collectors and scholars mention, when they initiate such discussions, and still to be continually ignored.

Regards,

R. John Howe

I hadn't intended to dismiss weave pattern with a wave of the hand. I think of it as a part of the general category, "structure". If I understand the discussion that went on about it, the basis of attribution based on weave pattern is that pieces from the same (geographic or tribal) source have similar weave patterns. How did we decide that they had the same source? Design, palette and motif, I believe.

Regards,

Steve Price

I think that Neff and Maggs would suggest your word "epistemology" invites the assumption that close conceptual distinctions will be appropriate in this salon.

They would also say that one of the major reasons they wrote their book was because they believe that "weave pattern" is both different from close structural analysis and a "more stable" basis for making attributions.

Now we weren't able to use it very well and we think we caught them in some mistakes, but neither of these occurences provides very serious evidence that the weave pattern perspective is not both distinctive and useful enough to merit separate mention in our listings of indicators we use to estimate attribution.

Regards,

R. John Howe

I use "epistemology" here to mean the general question, "How do we know that the things we think are true really are true?" I may be mistaken, but I believe that this is the normal use of the word.

If you prefer to separate "weave pattern" out of the category of things I called "structure", that's fine. It would simply require modifying the title to something like "The Epistemologies of Structure and Weave Pattern Based Attribution". My intention was to paint with rather broad strokes, separating the properties of a rug that are visible in, say, the color photos in a Sotheby's catalog from those that are not.

Regards,

Steve Price

Oh your use of "epistemology" is entirely "normal" but the people who tend to use it are not.

They tend to be folks who attacted to close distinctions and efforts at conceptual analysis that include such things as, "unpacking" the various meanings given usages of a term might suggest.

But, OK, we won't do that. We will have a general discussion of what we mean when we say that we know something about where a given rug was woven or who wove it.

If I seem a little quieter now it's because I'm engaged in a deep, conceptually-based (but private) consideration of what it might be appropriate now to say.

Regards,

R. John Howe