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2 MOR AL EPISTEMOLOGY My chosen pathway into Yoruba moral discourse will be an epistemological one. If one synonym for “epistemology” is the “theory of knowledge,” then the process by which people claim to “know” someone’s moral character becomes an essential prerequisite to whatever moral values they thereafter attribute to that person (selfish, honorable, unreliable). KBW undertook the systematic study of Yoruba epistemological discourse. Appreciating the concerns of philosophical epistemology is facilitated if we begin from a typically everyday perspective. During the course of a lifetime an enormous amount of information is put at the disposal of the average person—via family and friends, education, the media. The task of distinguishing between information that is more or less reliable, between the true, the possibly true or untrue (i.e., indeterminate), and the false is one that concerns all of us. In English-language culture information that is considered most reliable is labeled “knowledge” and described as “true.” By linguistic convention , what one is said to “know” is “true.” Information that is considered less reliable, of which one cannot be certain, is labeled “belief.” By convention, information that falls within this category need not be true. On the other hand, neither is it false. Beliefs and believing consist of things people can neither prove nor disprove with certainty. People may one day discover that something they believed was in fact true, or false. (Information that was thought to be knowledge and labeled “true” may also turn out to be false, of course. Convention requires that people then admit that originally they made a mistake in assessing the epistemological status of that information.) In Yoruba-language culture the two most prominent categories for classifying or rating information, akin to the English-language “knowl- 14 | THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE BEAUTIFUL edge” and “belief,” are “ı̀mo .̀” and “ı̀gbàgbo .́.”1 At this preliminary point the word “akin” is used deliberately, signifying “comparable to” but not “the same as.” When the meanings of these two terms first began to be analyzed by Western scholars, the process resulted in unflattering comparisons . For example, A. B. Ellis (perfectly correctly) identified the components of “gbàgbo .́” and their equivalents in English-language translation as “gbà” (to accept) and “gbo .́” (to listen) (1974, pp. 305–402). But, rather than proceeding to outline the criteria that governed their usage and thereby giving some idea of how the Yoruba applied these verbs to speci fic pieces of information, Ellis undertook etymological analyses of their supposed semantic ‘roots’ that brought their latent meanings more in line with the paradigm of a primitive Africa. Both “gbà” and “gbo .́” were said to derive from the sounds “to indicate violence, exertion, whence to heat, beat to breaking, break, shatter, destroy , kill, dig, scrub, pierce. Also to make a loud sound, as to yell, cry out, crow, crash, and to produce by exertion, to make, commit, do” (Ellis 1974, p. 387). What ‘loaded’ semantic antecedents from which to derive cultural notions of listening and agreeing! The sad fact of the matter seems to have been that there was little interest in attempting to specify the criteria governing the application of epistemological vocabulary in African languages because of a presumption that sub-Saharan thought generally rated so low on the scale of universal rationality—was so lamentably unsystematic —that any such study would not be worth the effort.2 In Western epistemological theory the most problematic and controversial subcategory of information is what has come to be known as propositional knowledge.3 Generally this is associated with information in written or oral propositional (sentential) form that is supposed to be knowledge and therefore true, but which the individual recipient is in no position to test or to verify. When one reflects upon what a member of Western society may ‘learn’ in the course of a lifetime, it becomes clear 1. The verb forms are “mo .̀” and “gbàgbo .́.” 2. As evidenced by the following excerpt: “for man, however low he may be in the scale of civilisation, is always desirous of knowing the reasons for everything, and the West African negro in particular is of a very inquisitive turn of mind. Then, in order to satisfy the natural desire to know who the gods were and whence they came, the myths we have already recounted grew up, and the numerous discrepancies in them appear to show that the process was comparatively recent. It looks as if the stories had not...

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