In the previous section of the chapter, I expounded on the universe-of-harmony belief as the belief foundational to the ontological worldview of the ‘Africa’ of my analysis of African epistemology. The point of doing this was to indicate how we may begin to conceive knowledge in African epistemology. But before I take up the task of presenting an analysis of knowledge derivable from this view about being (what is) in Africa, I will consider the sort of commitment to ontology that the universe-of-harmony belief makes of the African. This is because the assumptions of ontology to which the African belief system commits us may be taken to relay the nature of knowledge in African epistemology. The point here is that as we ‘see’ the world through our worldviews, which are inclusive of our thoughts, beliefs, ideas, notions, and language, there are certain assumptions of being that undergird such worldviews. As such, as worldviews, which are a product of, and integral to, culture, are a means by which we categorise reality into different representations, though the contents of those representations change from culture to culture (Bartle 1983: 87), they commit us to certain assumptions regarding the nature of being (i.e. what is).
Given what has been said so far regarding the senses of Africa and the reasons for which the universe-of-harmony belief is represented as a reductive description of the ontological worldview of the African, it can safely be said that the African belief in a harmonious universe represents the foundational belief of the African regarding what is, that is, regarding being. As such, the universe-of-harmony belief envisions the universe as an organic whole with a hierarchy of existents. Taken as foundational in the African belief system, it foregrounds and organises the conceptual and practical life of the African; it permeates the social, ethical, religious, and political life of the African. It yields what may be referred to as methodological ontologism – the view that the organising category of human thought and social relations derives from our ontological commitments (that is, the beliefs we hold about the nature of reality or what is). For further elucidation, the universe-of harmony belief may be stated thus:
The universe is an organic (harmonious) whole made of a hierarchy of existents. (φ)
From (φ), it can be taken that irrespective of how the universe-of-harmony belief is expressed or what is believed to make up the hierarchy of existents, the belief asserts the existence of certain entities. This is what is taken to represent the existential claims of the universe-of-harmony belief. And since we can know what ontology people endorse by finding out what existential claims or assertions they make or are prepared to make or accept, it is by establishing what a belief says there is that we understand the ontological commitment of such belief. More precisely, since beliefs are inert and cannot themselves make claims, we should ask what exist ential claims or assertions would be made by someone who asserts a belief of what there is. It is important to note that an utterer’s ontological commitment depends on whether the utterer believes that the content of the utterances of the kind made are ontologically significant. In this regard, for the African, statements of the kind of (φ) are utterances that are ontologically significant given the disposition of the African to the content of (φ). This, indeed, is why believe in (φ) can be seen to calibrate the life of the African in terms of what she does, believes, and says – the things that matter and those that do not. Talks about the ontological significance of beliefs or statements are talks about what it means to exist. So the discourse of the ontological significance of beliefs presupposes the discourse about ontological commitment, which examines what it means to posit the existence of something.
The discourse of ontological commitment is widely taken to have been brought to the fore in the 1939 work – "A Logical Approach to the Ontological Problem" – of the American philosopher William von Orman Quine. In his discussion, Quine proposed a thesis intended to redefine and restrict the meaning of ‘existence’. This is because his definition of existence was meant to allow targeted contents of sys tematic theories to be treated as actually describing the world, while avoiding the apparently insoluble problems involved in formulating an all-encompassing theory of existence (Hallen 2021: 3). The discourse of ontological commitment originally relates to the problem of universals. The problem of universals has to do with how to address the question of whether universals are as real as the so-called particular material objects, in the sense, that they also exist independently of their use in everyday conversations. While my goal is not to rehearse the history of the dis course of ontological commitment, which bothers on the problem of universals, I will pay some attention to Quine’s analysis of the concept ‘exist’. To this end, the crux of Quine’s analysis regarding the question of "what is" was what it means to affirm the existence of an entity, rather than what things exist. As such, the product of Quine’s investigation was not "a catalogue of what exists, but a construal of what it is to exist, which is the core of a ‘concept of existence’ and an important part of a broader ‘doctrine of being’" (Durante 2018:). This is how Quine (1966) puts it:
Note that we can use the word ‘roundness’ without acknowledging any suchentity. We can maintain that the word is syncategorematic, like prepositions,conjunctions, articles, commas, etc.: that though it occurs as an essential partof various meaningful sentences it is not a name of anything. To ask whetherthere is such an entity as roundness is thus not to question the meaningfulnessof ‘roundness’; it amounts rather to asking whether this word is a name or asyncategorematic expression.
From the above, Quine can be read to make a distinction between understanding the notion of existence as meaningfulness and as a reference (that is, a name or a syncategorematic expression).8 For clarity, relating existence with meaningfulness or significance seems a good way of linking with idealistic or phenomenalistic notions of existence, or even with a deflationism about ontology, while connecting being with reference, by contrast, seems a reasonable path towards ontological realism. Quine however rejects associating existence with meaningfulness or significance; he instead approves of associating existence with reference. The two ways of significance and reference by which existence may be conceived, according to Quine, may be seen to be radically different in terms of the relation between concepts and the contents of concepts.
Resulting from Quine’s analysis, the examination of the nature of the onto logical commitment of the African worldview about the universe bothers not on whether the wholly harmonious universe made of gods and deities and ancestors exists, but on what it means to say (or believe) that the world is an organic whole or that deities and gods exist. The distinction here is that whereas the former demands an explication of the catalogue of evidence that the universe is an organic whole or how it is that gods and deities and ancestors exist, the latter requires an appraisal of what it means for a harmonious universe with a hierarchy of gods and deities and ancestors to exist. In examining the ontological commitment arising from (φ), I will attempt a construal of what it means for such a universe to exist, which, according to Daniel Durante, is "the core of a ‘concept of existence’ and an important part of a broader ‘doctrine of being’" (Durante 2018:). Before doing this, I will pay some attention to specifying the ontological commitments of the universe-of-harmony belief in relation to the two concepts of existence identified by Quine. This is with the intent to indicate the requirements of both, as well as to specify which best apprehends the route to construing the epistemic attitude of the African in relation to being. This will help to elucidate my choice of paying attention to what it means, rather than an explication of the catalogue of evidence, for such a universe to exist.
In specifying the ontological commitments of the two concepts of meaning fulness and reference regarding ‘existence’, let us recall (φ): The universe is an organic (harmonious) whole made of a hierarchy of existents. The phrase, ‘an organic whole made of a hierarchy of existents’, is a meaningful term of the sentence (φ). According to the doctrine which associates being with significance or meaningfulness, it is plausible to impute the existence of ‘an organic whole made of a hierarchy of existents’ to anyone who sanctions a sentence or an assertion wherein it portrays a significant association with being. That is, if meaningfulness assures existence, then (φ) expresses an onto logical commitment with the belief in the existence of ‘an organic whole made of a hierarchy of existents’. According to Quine’s preferred doctrine which relates being with reference, however, it is only legitimate to impute the supposition that ‘an organic whole made of a hierarchy of existents’ exists to anyone who sanctions (φ) if ‘an organic whole made of a hierarchy of existents,’ works as a vehicle for reference (a role usually occupied by names), even if ‘an organic whole made of a hierarchy of existents’ is a syncategorematic expression which, though contributing to the meaning of the sentence, does not name any entity.
An important question that arises from the foregoing is what ontological commitments arise for an African who holds (φ) – that is, the belief in the existence of a harmonious universe with a hierarchy of gods and deities and ancestors? Does it commit her to ontological realism about the entities of the belief? Or does it commit her to a kind of meaning-making about the universe? In the first instance, the African faces the daunting task of evidential justification (very likely in the positivist/empiricist sense of this) if the belief commits her to ontological realism (particularly the hard version) regarding the existents to which reference is made in the belief. This is because reference to entities of the immaterial world of gods and ancestors would only be meaningful if such reference had referents that are percep tually accessible. But since no sense-dependent reference that evidentially justifies the existence of the entities of the African belief is readily available, it seems safe to say that commitments to the ontology of the claims of the African belief do not require those of realism. The challenge with this, however, is that the indigenous or autochthonous African believes in the ‘real’ existence of the entities of her belief in a wholly harmonious universe. This implies that since the African believes in real existence of gods and ancestors, even though she is not able to evidential justify her belief, the ontological commitment of the African belief in a wholly harmo nious universe of gods and deities requires the specification of the reference version of ontological commitment.
Given this new challenge, I will pay attention to examining the ontological commitment of (φ) in terms of the requirement of specifying its reference. This is because I suppose that in addressing the ontological commitment arising from the reference specification of what existence implies, I would be addressing myself to how it is that the African conceives the reality of the universe of the gods and ancestors. That is, the reference version of the ontological commitment of what existence implies seems to better describe the dispositional attitude of the African regarding the immaterial entities of the belief regarding the universe. My examination of the ontological commitment of (φ) in terms of specifying its reference draws on the idea of ‘abduction’ or ‘inference to the best explan ation’. This is because on a review of ‘evidential justification’ – one that takes its understanding beyond those of the positivists – it is possible to provide some justification.
The idea of abduction or inference to the best explanation is that when faced with a set of alternative hypotheses – all of which cover the data – to explain a phenomenon, we are likely to accept the hypothesis that we, somehow, judge to be superior to the others (see Vahid 2005: 181).9 In this sense, the chosen hypothesis, in comparison with others, entails a better explanation of the phenomenon in question (see Metz 2022). To be sure, abduction has been taken as a useful mechanism in belief formation. As a belief-forming mechanism, we sort of begin, in one instance, by putting up hypotheses to (possibly) explain a cer tain phenomenon. We then continue to make observations to determine which hypothesis best explains the phenomenon. Informed by what scientists describe as the doctrine of the accumulation of knowledge, we may eventually settle for a hypothesis that sort of provides an expansive explanation when compared with others.
Relating this to the belief of the African in the real existence of gods and ancestors, a rational ground for the belief may be provided by recourse to infer ence to the best explanation. In this vein, one may rhetorically ask whether the disbelief of an African in the reality of gods and ancestors in the face of certain experiences such as, say, the abiku/ogbanje phenomenon, and episodes that indicate ‘more than’ natural human display would not have posed more explanatory incon sistencies.10 Put differently, how is the African to explain phenomena occurrences as that of abiku/ogbanje without postulating the existence of the immaterial entities she alludes to as explanatory model for such phenomena?11 And so, in the sense in which inference to the best explanation is understood historically as explana tory reasoning in generating hypotheses, it may be taken to have undergirded the allusions indigenous Africans made in referring to the existence of forces as explan ation for occurrences as abiku/Ogbanje.
It would however be noted that in instances of abduction, "the connection between the evidence and the hypothesis is non-demonstrative or inductive" (Lipton 2000: 184). This implies that though the hypothesis has been inferred on the basis of what is observed of the phenomenon, it remains possible that the hypothesis is false even though the observed phenomenon is what it is. As such, while abduction or inference to the best explanation seems a rather fair mechanism of belief formation in areas such as common sense, science, and philosophy, it is also the source of a great many puzzles. The main question that it raises concerns the nature of the inferential mechanism that is thought to underlie these cases of belief formation. Put differently, this raises the challenge of the basing relation in terms of alluding to the existence of imperceptibles as a reason for abiku/ogbanje-like events by recourse to inference to the best explanation. Specifically, it is whether the inferential mechanism in such cases is thought to be a necessary, even though not sufficient, condition for the belief in the existence of imperceptible being justified. I will however not address this question here for want of space. Suffice it to say that the discourse of counterfactuals holds.