Knowledge, Belief, and Witchcraft: Analytic Experiments in African Philosophy

by Barry Hallen, J. Sodipo, Willard Van Orman Quine

First published in 1986, Knowledge, Belief, and Witchcraft remains the only analysis of indigenous discourse about an African belief system undertaken from within the framework of Anglo-American analytical philosophy. Taking as its point of departure W. V. O. Quine's thesis about the indeterminacy of translation, the book investigates questions of Yoruba epistemology and of how knowledge is conceived in an oral culture.

Genres: Philosophy, Africa

163 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1997

Reviews

[Omorodion Godmust]

Nice book

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting book. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in cross-cultural communication or non-Western thought, even if you're not familiar with philosophy or anthropology (it's a pretty straightforward read).

The book is a collaboration between an American philosopher and a Nigerian philosopher, and arises out of debates over the definition (or even the mere existence) of “African philosophy.” Hallen and Sodipo argue against the common notion that the term “philosophy” should only apply to the traditions of thought deriving from the Ancient Greeks. But instead of just presenting a theoretical argument about how Western and indigenous philosophies might fruitfully communicate, they set out to demonstrate it, to actually *DO* African philosophy. To accomplish this they draw on the methods of “ordinary language philosophy” - a school of thought originating in 1940s England that focuses on how philosophical terms are actually used in everyday communication (so instead of asking “what is truth,” for example, an ordinary language philosopher would ask “what sorts of things do people mean when they use the word ‘truth’?”).

Using this approach, they analyze two terms in the Yoruba language (an oral culture) that are typically translated into English as "knowledge" and "belief." They discover that in the way they're actually used, these terms mean completely different things from their assumed English equivalents, the former term referring to things directly seen with one's eyes, the latter term referring to things learned second hand. In the process of this investigation they raise all sorts of fascinating questions about epistemology (the theory of knowledge), translation, anthropology, and the relationship between Western philosophy and non-Western philosophy.

The “witchcraft” in the title refers to the second section of the book, where they critique older anthropological explanations of African witchcraft, but this part was less interesting to me.