Narrative Understanding as Epistemic Excellence in African Oral Traditions — Epoche C1
The claim at issue The question this essay presses is whether understanding — the state we credit to someone who has grasped how a matter hangs together, as against someone who merely has the facts about it — is a kind of knowledge, and it presses the question through a body of material that is unusually well suited to settling it: the proverb traditions of West African oral cultures, and the Akan corpus in particular. The reductionist position holds that to understand why something is the case is to know why it is the case, and that knowing why is knowing a set of propositions, namely the ones that state the explanation. On this view understanding adds nothing new to epistemology; it names a quantity or an organisation of knowledge rather than a distinct achievement. Stephen Grimm defended a version of this in 2006, arguing that understanding is knowledge of causes and dependence relations, and that the sense of something extra is an illusion produced by the fact that the relations known are structural rather than isolated. Ranged against it is the position Jonathan Kvanvig set out in 2003, on which understanding is a distinct epistemic good: to understand is to grasp the relations that hold among a body of information, and grasping is not the same as believing truths about the relations. The dispute matters beyond the seminar. If the reductionist is right, then an epistemology built around knowledge is complete, and understanding needs no separate theory. If not, then something we value highly has been going unanalysed. A correction is owed at the outset, because the earlier version of this essay named the wrong opponent. It presented Linda Zagzebski's Virtues of the Mind (1996) as tending to reduce understanding to knowledge virtuously acquired. Zagzebski is in fact one of the most explicit opponents of the reduction. In 'Recovering Understanding' (2001) she argues that understanding has been lost to modern epistemology precisely because the discipline made the isolated proposition its unit of analysis; that the objects of understanding are not propositions but structures; and that understanding is more closely related to skill than to belief. Her position and this essay's are on the same side, and the argument below draws on her rather than against her. What her framework does need, and what the oral material can supply, is a case in which the difference between possessing propositions and understanding is not a matter of philosophical intuition but of public fact. A test that separates the two Before turning to that material, the two states must be distinguished by something better than assertion, and the most usable criterion in the recent literature is Alison Hills's. In 'Understanding Why' (2016) she argues that understanding why p involves what she calls cognitive control: a cluster of abilities that a person who merely knows the explanation need not have. Someone who understands why p can, in the normal case, follow an explanation of p given by another; explain p in their own words rather than in the words they were taught; draw the conclusion that q from the information that p in a case they have not met before; and say what would have followed had one of the factors been different. The argument for taking these as constitutive rather than merely symptomatic runs by cases. A student memorises the sentences that state why a bridge failed and reproduces them faultlessly. He satisfies every condition for knowing those propositions: they are true, he believes them, and he acquired them from a reliable source. Yet if he cannot say which part of the account is doing the work, cannot restate it without the original wording, and cannot tell you what would have happened had the wind been lighter, we withhold the word 'understands' — and we withhold it not because we suspect he lacks some further proposition, but because he cannot do anything with the ones he has. Since knowledge of the propositions is present and understanding is absent, the two are not identical. That is the test the rest of this essay applies. Why a proverb tradition is the right place to apply it Most test cases for this dispute are invented, and invented cases can be built to order. The African proverb traditions provide something better: a situation in which the propositional content is deliberately made public and universally available, so that any inequality in epistemic standing cannot be an inequality in propositional possession. That is what makes them evidence rather than illustration, and it is the reason for the essay's title. Ruth Finnegan's Oral Literature in Africa (1970), still the standard survey, documents how proverbs actually function across the continent's oral cultures. They are not a private stock. Children hear them constantly; they are recited in courts and in disputes; among the Akan and elsewhere they are carried on drums, staffs and cloth, so that their texts are broadcast rather than reserved. Finnegan's central observation for present purposes is that the meaning of a proverb is not fixed by its wording but by its application: the same saying serves opposite ends in different situations, and its force in any given case comes from the aptness of the match between the saying and the circumstance. What is admired in an accomplished speaker is not the size of his repertoire but his judgement in deployment. Kwame Gyekye's An Essay on African Philosophical Thought (1995) supplies the second half of the argument, and it is the decisive half. Gyekye treats Akan proverbs as genuine philosophical material, but he insists that they cannot be read off as a doctrine, because the corpus contains proverbs that recommend opposite courses of action and assert opposite things about the world. This is not a defect peculiar to Akan; every proverb stock has it, as English has both 'look before you leap' and 'he who hesitates is lost'. But the consequence for epistemology is sharp. If understanding the corpus