A panel of eminent scholars came together to discuss Alfred Whitehead’s relevance to current issues in science studies, technoscience and pragmatism. Beginning with Isabelle Stengers’ recent work on “Penser avec Whitehead”, the panel discussed the role of Whithead’s ‘propositions’ for facilitating non-reductive modes of understanding ‘common matters of concern’ in the sciences. Stengers and Haraway generally agreed that a ‘pragmatic and situated philosophy’ was necessary in order to avoid abstractions and highlight corporeal/felt understanding irreducible to and incommunicable via language. While this seems to steer the sciences toward fragmentation along ‘individual’ lines, the two scholars emphasized that ‘common concerns’ or ‘obligations’ within an ecology of practice function to join specialists without being subsumed under denaturing, ‘unwise’ concepts. Rorty agreed that fragmentation of specialties was ocurring but was more optimistic about the result of democratic and adjudicating inquiry. Further, he contested that while Whitehead attempted to ‘disclose what was formerly undisclosed’ via propositions and attention to complex relationships, he fell short in his project to show the ‘failure of language’. For Rorty, this was more ably acheived by Wittgenstein and his demonstration of the use/practical value of language in tandem with its inability to fully disclose (with reliance upon abstraction) any ‘essential reality’ in science or life generally. Nevertheless, Haraway used examples of dog-human non-verbal communication to argue that, contrary to Rorty’s insistence upon utility being found primarily in language, there are a host of non-discursive relationships which have utility and highlight coordination in Stengers’ ‘matters of concern’. In what Stengers called an emerging awareness of an ‘ecology of practice’, these non-verbal connections are what need to be attended to in science and technology. Such a move away from linguistic practices (contra Rorty) is to de-center humanism in order to take seriously relationships between humans and nonhumans. With this insight, the discussion hooked-up with recent work in symmetrical archaeology and its move to de-center the archaeologist-as-interpreting-a-past-as-text. As well, with collective utility being forwarded as the panel’s measure of success in investigation, the notion of working-with the past, rather than disclosing the past, highlights media as a vital, non-verbal manner of effecting active engagement with the past in the present.