Having examined and developed key ideas – especially the senses of ‘Africa’ in African epistemology and the ontological commitment following from the universe-of-harmony belief – I would now turn to the account of knowledge I label ‘Ontologised knowledge’. As a first stab, this account of knowledge aggregates from preceding discussions on the senses of Africa and the universe-ofharmony belief. In this vein, Ontologised knowledge describes what is cognisable and eventually cognised by an acceptation of what is, according to the worldviews of African cultures south of the Sahara. To be noted, however, is that though the account of knowledge is analysed to derive from the worldviews of African cultures south of the Sahara, it is not exclusive to it.12 To reiterate, what is, in the context of Africa south of the Sahara, is understood to constitute an organic whole in the sense of a connection of the immaterial and the material. As such, to comprehend the events and happenings of her existence, the African derives explanation from the nexus of the material and the immaterial. In practical terms, therefore, not everything is to be understood by recourse to only physicalist principles or to only spiritualist ones. Rather, her framework for engaging the world is one that draws on the principles of these aspects of the world as the event or happening demands; no principles are, ab initio, excluded. In this vein, for the African, the world or universe is a continuum that encompasses the experien tial, rational, religious, intuitive, symbolic, mythological, and emotional aspects of reality. Indeed, the African notion of continuum implies the existence of spiritual components of the world that interfaces with the physical constituent of human experience.
From the foregoing, Ontologised knowledge, as an epistemic framework, is the view that to truly cognise a thing, it should be viewed from how it relates to an interdependent whole (e.g. Hamminga 2005).13 Put differently, it is the view that knowledge, for an epistemic agent, results from social interactions and systems (see Goldman and O’Connor 2021), as well as interactions of the material with the immaterial. As such, it is knowledge relating to a variety of entities that are all richly interconnected including imperceptible entities. In this sense, African epistemology is realised in the tradition of social epistemology.14 More specifically, it realises itself as an instance of communitarian epistemology. As an instance of social epistemology, the focus of African epistemology is how the epistemic agent achieves knowledge through interactions in/with the environment, not simply as an individual, but as an individual in a community of epistemic agents. In this vein, the nature of knowledge in African epistemology is not radically distinct from, say, the more dominant views about knowledge in mainstream epistemology.15 The rather distinguishing mark is that in African epistemology, the nature of knowledge is characterised by how the knowing process includes assumptions that go beyond the physical or material aspect of reality, while in mainstream epistemology, assumptions are predominantly restricted to what are largely empirically demon strable. For instance, in the traditional account where knowledge is characterised as a belief that is true and justified (the JTB account), justificatory tests for knowledge, to a significant degree, only allow for empirical-based forms of justification, because what is usually stated as the content of the justification assumes what is empirically available. But with respect to African epistemology and the account of knowledge given as Ontologised knowledge, a claim passes as knowledge if there are deducible or inferential circumstances and events that may warrant the claim in question. In some instances, if not many, such circumstances may be accepted to be warrant granting to claims made in this regard on the grounds of prudence. And so, the nature of knowledge in African epistemology – as an epistemology that is grounded on the relation of being and knowledge – can be gleaned from an explication of, say, the epistemic of (φ). But to talk about this is to indicate how epistemic claims in the Ontologised knowledge account is achieved or justified. Explicating this how ever exceeds the focus in this chapter, as the focus in the chapter is to identify the nature and character of knowledge in African epistemology, which has been given as ‘Ontologised knowledge’.16
In brief, however, talking about the epistemic of (φ) is quite similar to talking about the epistemological value of (φ). This is on the grounds that since the epi stemic of (φ) requires a specification of what makes (φ) worthy of rational accep tation, the epistemological value concerns the purpose(s) the belief serves. That is, given that African epistemology is an instance of social epistemology, the basis for why (φ) is worthy of rational acceptation is as a result of the purpose(s) (φ) serves. And so, the epistemological of (φ) – what makes (φ) rational – is not simply that it conduces to the truth according to some view of the epistemological conception of truth, but that it achieves pragmatic/prudential purposes in organising social life (of the African). Put differently, the epistemological value of (φ) is prudential, where its acceptation serves for dealing with human experiences. To this end, the epistemic value of (φ) (and similar African beliefs) is derivable from its significance/useful ness and not from its correctness; that is, its epistemic worth is not to be judged by the correctness of its belief content, but by usefulness of its belief content for organising social life.17 Following from this, I do not by any means imply that the only basis of knowledge in the context of African epistemology is the prudential value of, say, (φ). Rather, I assume, in this regard, that if, with respect to the basing relation between a reason and a belief, a reason possessed by an epistemic agent is distinguished by the contribution it makes to the personal justification of a given belief though such reason may not contain empirical evidence, in the instance of African epistemology where knowledge serves, among others, the purposes of social cohesion and comprehension of the complimentarity of the material and immaterial aspects of reality, prudential reason(s) suffice for holding the beliefs that are characteristics of the African worldview.