African Epistemologies and the Virtues of Understanding — Epoche C2
The charge, and why it was aimed at the wrong target The claim this essay defends is that some of the excellences which make understanding possible are aesthetic and practical rather than intellectual — receptivity to the form in which something is said, skill in applying what one has grasped — and that the epistemic practices documented in African oral deliberation and sage traditions supply the clearest evidence for it. The earlier version of this essay advanced that claim by making Linda Zagzebski's Virtues of the Mind (1996) the exemplar of the omission it wanted to correct, describing her account as circumscribed by an intellectualist bias that foregrounds intellectual virtues at the expense of aesthetic and practical ones. That attribution is not merely uncharitable; it reverses her position, and the reversal has to be undone before the positive argument can be stated, because the thesis Zagzebski actually defends is one of the essay's own premises. Her book's organising argument is that the standard separation of intellectual from moral virtue is a mistake. Against the reliabilist tradition, which treats intellectual virtues as well-functioning faculties — vision, memory, inference — Zagzebski holds that virtues are acquired excellences of character, each with two components: a motivational component, a persistent orientation towards some end, and reliable success in reaching that end. Intellectual virtues on this account are not a separate genus but a subset of the moral virtues, distinguished by their characteristic motivation, which she identifies as the motivation for cognitive contact with reality. Open-mindedness is then a virtue in the same sense and by the same analysis as generosity. Her definition of knowledge follows the same pattern: a state of cognitive contact with reality arising out of acts of intellectual virtue. And the virtue that coordinates the others in her scheme is phronesis , practical wisdom — the excellence by which an agent judges what this situation calls for and how competing considerations are to be weighed. A theory whose master virtue is practical wisdom cannot be convicted of excluding the practical. Her treatment of understanding, which appears in 'Recovering Understanding' (2001) rather than in the 1996 book, is if anything further from the position ascribed to her. Its argument is that epistemology has neglected understanding because epistemology has been propositional: it has treated the objects of epistemic states as propositions, and understanding does not have propositions as its objects. What one understands is a structure, a whole with parts that fit together, and the classical model for this is not belief but technē — the grasp a craftsman has of what he makes. Understanding, on that model, comes in degrees and has qualities, and it is more like a skill than like a stock of true beliefs. This is the position the earlier version was arguing towards, and it had already been reached by the author it named as the opponent. The assumption that does need challenging Withdrawing the charge does not leave the essay without a target; it makes the target precise. Three commitments can be separated in the analytic literature on understanding, and they are logically independent: Propositional vehicle: what is understood is a set of propositions, and to have understanding is to stand in some relation to them. Truth-directed assessment: the quality of an epistemic state is a function of the truth of its contents. Individual bearer: the thing that has understanding is a single subject, and any group-level talk is shorthand for facts about individual members. Zagzebski's account of understanding rejects the first and qualifies the second; a state whose object is a structure and whose model is craft is not assessed simply by counting true propositions. What it retains, without argument, is the third. The craftsman is a man; the exercise of phronesis is an individual's judgement; the motivational component belongs to a person. The evidence considered below bears on the third commitment and on the first, and the honest statement of the corrected thesis is that it amends virtue epistemology in one specific place rather than overturning it. Sage philosophy: what was collected, by whom, and what it shows The strongest evidence available on this question is not anecdotal, because it was gathered as a research programme with an explicit design. Henry Odera Oruka's Sage Philosophy (1990) reports interviews conducted with rural Kenyan thinkers who had no formal Western education, recorded, translated, and published with the interlocutors named — Paul Mbuya Akoko among the best known — so that the reasoning could be assessed rather than summarised. The design was adversarial in intent. Oruka set out to test whether critical, second-order reflection existed in oral cultures independently of literacy and academic training, and the published dialogues are the evidence he offers. The distinction he drew on that evidence is the load-bearing one for this essay, and it cuts against a romantic reading of communal knowledge. Oruka separates folk sagacity — mastery of the accumulated wisdom of a community, its proverbs, precedents and customary judgements, held and transmitted faithfully — from philosophic sagacity , which is critical and second-order, and which he identifies by a particular mark: the philosophic sage can subject the community's own consensus to scrutiny and dissent from it, giving reasons. Both are real and both are epistemically valuable, but they are not the same achievement, and it is the second that Oruka counted as philosophy. Anyone who wants to draw epistemological conclusions from African communal practice must therefore reckon with the fact that the researcher who did most to document that practice defined its philosophical instances by the capacity to stand against the community. Hountondji's objection, which this argument has to survive The reck