For clarity, while I take ‘Knowledge ontologised’ to describe the distinctive character of African epistemology, I take ‘Ontologised knowledge’ to refer to an account of knowledge I construe in relation to African epistemology.
Though the linkage of knowledge and being within the broader discourse of epistemology has not been overtly examined, it can be read to have been implied. For instance, in the traditional account where knowledge is defined as justified true belief (JTB), it is noted that an epistemic agent, S, cannot be said to have a proposition, p, that is false. Put differently, only propositions that are true can be known. One implication of this in the context of the present chapter is that only what can be affirmed as the case can be known. And in the context of the study of being (ontology), what is affirmed as the case denotes ‘what is’. That is, a proposition, p, can be said to affirm ɸ, as in the expression, "I know that ɸ," where ɸ ultimately implies being. In this sense, therefore, claims to knowledge are claims about ‘what is’. So it can be argued that in the traditional account of knowledge – the JTB account – a relation to being (i.e. modes of being) is implied, though not explicitly.
I am not the first to use this coinage. For instance, see Chimakonam and Ogbonnaya. 2021. African Metaphysics, Epistemology, and a New Logic: A Decolonial Approach to Philosophy. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. But in the way I have explicated it here differs from how it has been conceived in other works.
By the universe-of-harmony belief is understood the African belief about the relation that exists among entities in the world. I have done some extensive work on this in another article where I examined the use of ‘Relationality’ in Thaddeus Metz’s African moral theory. In brief, I take ‘harmony’ in the universe-of-harmony to refer to relations, though in the African understanding it does include relations beyond what is supposed in Aristotle’s understanding of relations as explicated in his categories of being.
Peter Ekeh beautifully writes in an all-important article for understanding post-colonial Africa, "Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa: A Theoretical Statement" (1975), that Post-colonial Africa is a world signalling the existence of two different civilities; one which was introduced by her colonial masters, the other, the remnant of life-forms extending back to autochthonous Africa.
The point here is that the life-form of pre-colonial Africa is what our (African) col lective memory recalls to be African. That is, it is not that what we so refer to as African is uniquely an experience of Africans; rather, what we refer to as African worldview and reality today is what our collective memory/consciousness recalls as African. So irre spective of the colonial incursion, which distorted the configuration of the African iden tity, leaving in its wake an altered self of the African, we make recourse to the life-form of pre-colonial Africa, which persists side-by-side post-colonial life-form, as African.
Underlying kpele ritual is a system of ideas concerning the nature of the universe. At the core of this cosmology is the conception of a hierarchy of beings which comprises five classes: a Supreme Being, gods, human beings, animals, and plants (See Kilson 1969).
Taking existence as a syncategorematic expression implies that though the notion is taken to lack a denotation, it can nonetheless affect the denotation of a larger expres sion that contains it. Syncategorematic expressions are contrasted with categorematic expressions, which have their own denotations.
I would like to note here that how I approach providing explanation for the allusion to the existence of gods and ancestors in the African worldview by recourse to abduction or inference to the best explanation is not novel. Indeed, inference to the best explanation has informed the views of many theorists in areas as diverse as metaphysics, epistemology, and science, particularly in relation to immaterial or abstract entities in these areas. Armstrong’s defence of universals (Armstrong 1978), is an instance of this. The existence of God is inferred to as the best explanation of the existence and order of the universe.
For an elaborate read on the phenomenon of abiku/ogbanje, see Maduka Chidi T. "African Religious Beliefs in Literary Imagination: Ogbanje and Abiku in Chinua Achebe, J.P. Clark and Wole Soyinka." Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 22.1 (1987): 17– 25; Timothy Mobolade, "The Concept of Abiku," African Arts, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1973): 62– 64. Some may suggest non-belief, i.e. withholding belief rather than positing belief in imperceptibles. But this would have inevitably generated its own challenges for the African; it would have, for instance, generated similar challenges as that of experiencing the phenomenon itself.
There is no pretense here to deny the knowledge of the causal relation medical science has made between certain illnesses, such as sickle cell, and child mortality, in explaining some of the cases that where hitherto supposed to have be caused by the existence of abiku/ogbanje. Irrespective of this, the phenomenon of abiku (Yoruba)/ogbanje (Igbo) remains a viable explanatory framework, even though its scope may have been shown to be narrow as it is not explanatory of all such phenomena. Indeed, what can be said then is that science (medical science) has shown that not all child mortality can be connected to the phenomenon of abiku.
It is not exclusive because the view about ‘what is’ is available to other cultural settings; but it is only emphasised by African cultures south of the Sahara.
As Nisbett shows in The Geography of Thought, people think about and even see the world differently because of differing ecologies, social structures, philosophies, and educational systems that date back to ancient Greece and China.
I take African epistemology to fall within social epistemology rather than being a unique sort of epistemology. If the traditions of epistemology, particularly in terms of the approach to knowing, that have developed are roughly categorised, at least, three broad approaches are discernible. These are: (i) the Traditional/Classical account that gives the process of knowing to be the necessary and sufficient combination of belief, truth, and justification – and hence, defines knowledge as the necessary and sufficient combination of Justification, Truth, and Belief (the JTB account); (ii) the Knowledge-first account championed by Timothy Williams, where he argues that knowledge is not first realisable into justification, truth, and belief; and (iii) the Reason-first account championed by Eva Schmidt.
By mainstream epistemology, I refer to traditions of epistemology that have developed since sixteenth-century Western Europe, particularly following the rise of Modern science.
An explication of the claim made here is a major part of a forthcoming article: Epistemology ontologised..
My position here – that we understand knowledge in African epistemology in relation to epistemic prudence – suggests that in the debate of whether beliefs aim at truth/ correctness or whether the pragmatic aim supersedes the truth/correctness aim, I aver that the pragmatic aim holds pride of place.