INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE AND EPISTEMIC JUSTIFICATION

Abstract

Indigenous knowledge system, a strand of social epistemology, emphasises a socio-cultural dimension to the acquisition and justification of human knowledge. Previous studies have focused on traditional epistemology which searches for a universal condition for all human knowledge. However, inadequate attention has been paid to socio-cultural factors involved in the justification of human knowledge. Social epistemology, which accommodates social factors in human knowledge, also marginalised indigenous knowledge system because most of its projects revolve around the issue of social foundation or justification of scientific knowledge. This study was, therefore, designed to examine the nature of indigenous knowledge, with a view to bridging the gap created by various social epistemological approaches, and provide a more comprehensive account of human knowledge. Richard Rorty’s Contextualist Theory, a brand of social epistemology which admits socio-cultural and contextual justification of human knowledge, was adopted. Ten texts in social epistemology, including Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (PMN),Goldman’s Epistemology and Cognition (EC), Schmitt’s Socialising Epistemology: Social Dimensions of Knowledge (SESDK), Longino’s Science as Social Knowledge (SSK), Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolution (SSR), Bloor’s Knowledge and Social Imagery (KSI), and six texts in indigenous knowledge, including Hountondji’s Endogenous Knowledge (EK), Masolo’s Self and Community in a Changing World (SCCW), Joseph’s Interrogating Culture: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Social Theory (ICCPCST), and Sogolo’s Foundations of African Philosophy (FAP), were examined. These texts interrogate the issue of human knowledge and its justification. Data were subjected to qualitative analysis using the philosophical tools of criticism, conceptual analysis and reconstruction. The PMN, SSK and KSI revealed that knowledge is a social phenomenon, and that the acquisition and justification of human knowledge is socio-culturally determined. An understanding of the social dimension of human knowledge, which is missing in traditional epistemology and other recent epistemological orientations such as naturalised epistemology and evolutionary epistemology, is indispensable towards the realisation of an adequate account of human knowledge (SSR, EC, SESDK). The SCCW and ICCPCST established that reducing the project of social epistemology to the task of social justification of scientific knowledge is too limiting and that employing scientific principles as paradigmatic method of validating all knowledge claims is also inadequate. Many aspects of indigenous knowledge system are essentially metaphysical with far-reaching social and psychological implications. Hence, their epistemological justification ought to be within the contexts of metaphysical, social and psychological conditions (EK, FAP). Critical intervention shows that indigenous knowledge, which admits of epistemological pluralism by accommodating two or more justification conditions, bridges the gap created by other social epistemological approaches to human knowledge. Indigenous knowledge admits of the metaphysical, social and psychological conditions of knowledge, thereby bridging the gap created by previous epistemological approaches to the acquisition and justification of human knowledge. Therefore, it provides a more comprehensive account of human knowledge than other theories of knowledge.