Epistemology: Ìmọ̀, Ìgbàgbọ́ and the Standards of Evidence

Yoruba has two words where English has the pair "know" and "believe", and they do not divide up the same territory. Ìmọ̀ covers what you have established for yourself at first hand. Ìgbàgbọ́ covers what you have accepted on someone else's word. The dividing line falls between firsthand and secondhand, not between certainty and uncertainty, and it therefore cuts across the English distinction rather than matching it. That is the central finding of Barry Hallen and J. Olubi Sodipo's Knowledge, Belief and Witchcraft, and it is one of the few results in African philosophy that has forced a genuine reconsideration of a Western philosophical assumption rather than merely adding a comparative example 1.

This file argues that the finding is philosophically serious and not an ethnographic curiosity, and it also sets out the objections, because they are substantial.

The method and why it matters

Hallen and Sodipo were philosophers, one American and one Nigerian, and Sodipo was a professional Yoruba-speaking philosopher of the analytic tradition. Their method was to hold extended structured discussions with onísègùn, masters of Yoruba medicine, on the meaning and use of a set of terms: ìmọ̀, ìgbàgbọ́, òótọ́ and the vocabulary of àjẹ́ 12.

Three features of the method deserve notice.

First, they went to practitioners rather than to texts, and to a class of practitioner whose profession requires them to make and defend knowledge claims under conditions where being wrong has consequences. An onísègùn who misidentifies a plant or misdiagnoses a case fails visibly.

Second, they treated the responses as philosophical data, subjecting them to analysis and argument in the manner of ordinary language philosophy rather than reporting them as beliefs held by a people. The book has been described as the only analysis of indigenous discourse about an African belief system undertaken from within the framework of Anglo-American analytical philosophy 2.

Third, and most importantly, the whole project departs from W. V. O. Quine's thesis of the indeterminacy of translation 13. Quine's argument is that translation between languages is underdetermined by all possible behavioural evidence, so that incompatible translation manuals can be equally consistent with everything speakers do and say. Hallen and Sodipo's application is precise: if that is true, then the standard bilingual dictionary equations of ìmọ̀ with knowledge and ìgbàgbọ́ with belief are not neutral findings but choices, and a century of scholarship describing what "the Yoruba believe" has been built on an unexamined translation. Quine contributed a foreword to the Stanford edition 3.

That framing is what makes the book philosophy rather than ethnography. It is not reporting exotic opinions. It is arguing that a particular translation is wrong and that the error has consequences for what anyone can claim to know about African thought.

Ìmọ̀

Ìmọ̀ is what the onísègùn treat as knowledge properly so called, and the criterion is firsthand experience: what a person has seen with their own eyes and undergone at first hand, provided there is conscious comprehension of what is perceived 4. Only propositions describing such experience are counted as òótọ́, true 4.

Two clarifications keep this from being misread as naive empiricism.

The comprehension condition is doing real work. Merely having a sense impression is not ìmọ̀. The onísègùn require that the perceiver understood what they were perceiving, which builds an interpretive component into the criterion and means that the same event can yield ìmọ̀ for a trained observer and not for an untrained one. An onísègùn seeing a patient sees things a bystander does not.

And ojú, eye, is not restricted to the physical eye. Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju's account of the wider Yoruba epistemological vocabulary sets out the progression from ojú òde, the external eye, to ojú inú, the inward eye, where the inward eye covers critical thought, imagination, intuition and forms of perception that exceed the ordinary senses 5. Babatunde Lawal's work on Yoruba perception theory is the foundation here 5. So Yoruba first-person witness is a broader category than sensory observation, and a divinatory or trained perception can count as firsthand. What it excludes is not the non-sensory. What it excludes is hearsay.

Ìgbàgbọ́

Ìgbàgbọ́ is what you have from others. The morphology is transparent and it is the key to the whole analysis: gbà, to accept or to receive, and gbọ́, to hear. Ìgbàgbọ́ is accepting-what-is-heard.

This is not the etymology of the English "belief", which comes through Germanic roots associated with holding dear and carries no reference to a source at all. English belief is a propositional attitude specified by its strength and its relation to truth. Yoruba ìgbàgbọ́ is specified by where the content came from. The two words are classifying by different criteria entirely, and once that is seen, the standard dictionary equation is clearly not an identity.

Hallen's later etymological analysis pushes further, arguing that ìgbàgbọ́ is better rendered as affirmation than as belief, indicating a stronger and more conscious mental state than English belief conveys 4. Ìgbàgbọ́ is not tentative. You can be entirely confident in your ìgbàgbọ́ and it remains ìgbàgbọ́, because its classification depends on its provenance rather than on your confidence.

Note the modern usage that will confuse a Yoruba Christian reader: ìgbàgbọ́ is the standard word for religious faith in Yoruba, and onígbàgbọ́, one who has ìgbàgbọ́, is the ordinary Yoruba word for a Christian. In Christian usage the term names a virtue. In the onísègùn's usage it names the epistemic category that has not yet met the standard. The same word carries the highest religious commendation in one register and marks the lower epistemic rank in the other, and this is not a contradiction so much as two communities using a word for what each takes to be central about it.

Testing and conversion

The relationship between the two categories is not a hierarchy of contempt. Ìgbàgbọ́ is where nearly everything starts, and the interesting question is what happens to it.

Second-hand information can be experimentally tested and verified, and if the verification succeeds it becomes ìmọ̀ 4. This is the crux. Ìgbàgbọ́ is not permanently second class; it is provisional, and there is a route out of it, and the route is that you go and check.

Where verification cannot be carried out, discussion, analysis and good judgement are the tools for distinguishing more reliable from less reliable information 4. So the framework is not the crude one that unverified claims are worthless. It is a framework with three levels: established at first hand, accepted from others and assessed by judgement, and rejected.

Consider what this means in practice for an onísègùn. His training is largely transmission from a teacher, which arrives as ìgbàgbọ́. He then uses the remedies, observes what happens, and converts what he can into ìmọ̀. His mature competence is a body of tested knowledge that began as testimony, and the epistemology describes his professional life accurately: a practitioner who accepted his teacher's claims without ever testing them would be, by his own community's standards, someone with a great deal of ìgbàgbọ́ and little ìmọ̀.

Why this is a real philosophical result

The temptation is to read this as an interesting linguistic difference. It is more than that, for four reasons.

It severs source from certainty, which Western epistemology has trouble doing. The standard Anglo-American analysis, knowledge as justified true belief, makes belief the genus and knowledge a species of it, so that knowing entails believing. In the Yoruba scheme ìmọ̀ is not a species of ìgbàgbọ́, because they are distinguished by provenance and a thing cannot be both firsthand and secondhand. Ìmọ̀ does not entail ìgbàgbọ́. That is a structurally different epistemology, not a variant vocabulary.

It makes the epistemology of testimony central rather than peripheral. Anglo-American epistemology treated testimony as a marginal problem for most of the twentieth century, and it became a major subfield only from the 1990s. Yoruba epistemology, as Hallen and Sodipo describe it, is organised around the testimony question from the start, because it grammaticalises the distinction between what you found out and what you were told. For an oral culture, in which the transmission of the entire intellectual inheritance runs through testimony, having a first-class category marking testimonial provenance is not a limitation. It is the appropriate design.

It exposes an assumption in the Western picture. The Anglo-American treatment lets a proposition acquired purely from testimony count as knowledge if the testimony is reliable and the other conditions are met, so the difference between finding out and being told is not marked at the level of the concept. Yoruba marks it. Neither is obviously right, and the interesting result is that the choice is a choice. That is Quine's point arriving as a substantive finding: what looked like the natural way to carve up epistemic states turns out to be one option among others.

It shows that reflective epistemology is present in an oral culture without written philosophy. Not as folk sayings, but as criteria the onísègùn state, apply and defend under questioning. Hallen's related work on values found the same thing in the moral domain: evaluations of action and character proceed on clearly and logically delineated criteria, against the prevailing assumption that African thought is acquiescence to established values 6.

Òótọ́ and òtítọ́

The vocabulary of truth deserves separate handling because it is where this corpus's confidence drops.

Òótọ́ is what the onísègùn are reported as applying to propositions describing firsthand experience, and it is the term standing to ìmọ̀ as truth stands to knowledge 4. Òtítọ́ is the other Yoruba term commonly rendered truth, associated with truthfulness, honesty and the moral quality of a speaker.

Whether these are two distinct concepts or two forms of one word, and whether the distinction between propositional truth and personal truthfulness is drawn in Yoruba in the way that formulation suggests, this corpus has not been able to establish from any source consulted. The relationship between the two terms is stated confidently in several places in the secondary literature with no supporting analysis. Confidence: low. Readers who need this should go to Hallen and Sodipo directly rather than relying on summaries, this one included.

What can be said is that the tying of òótọ́ to ìmọ̀ means the Yoruba truth predicate as the onísègùn use it is more restrictive than the English one. A proposition can be, as we would say, true, without any speaker being in a position to call it òótọ́, because nobody has established it at first hand.

The objections

The finding has been contested and the objections are good ones. Presenting it without them would misrepresent the state of the field.

Infallibilism. The most serious charge is that taking verification by first-hand experience as the gold standard, and coupling it with a firm knowledge and belief dichotomy, commits Hallen and Sodipo to infallibilism about ìmọ̀ 7. If ìmọ̀ requires firsthand experience that cannot be wrong, the standard is one almost nothing meets, since firsthand perception is itself defeasible. Onísègùn misperceive. The objection is that the account has produced an epistemology too demanding to describe any actual practice, including that of the onísègùn themselves.

Testimony. The related objection is that the view taken of testimony is unduly restrictive, and that an oral culture can and does rely on testimony as a genuine source of justification without thereby being credulous or uncritical toward tradition 7. If Yoruba epistemology really demoted everything received from others, an oral culture could not maintain a body of knowledge across generations, and it plainly does. The critics argue for a reading in which testimony is a justifying source in Yoruba practice, with the ìmọ̀ and ìgbàgbọ́ distinction marking something less absolute than Hallen and Sodipo's presentation suggests.

Representativeness. The onísègùn are a specialist class in a specific area of Yorubaland, interviewed in the 1970s and 1980s. Whether their usage is Yoruba usage generally, or the professional usage of a group whose work demands unusual epistemic care, is a fair question. A comparable study of English usage conducted among laboratory scientists would also produce a stricter account of "know" than general English supports.

Determinacy again. Quine's thesis is a double-edged instrument here. If translation is genuinely indeterminate, that applies to Hallen and Sodipo's own preferred renderings as much as to the dictionary's. Their positive account, that ìmọ̀ tracks firsthand experience, is itself a translation manual and inherits the same underdetermination. The book's negative argument, that the standard equation cannot be assumed, is stronger than its positive one.

None of these objections shows the central observation to be false. The morphology of ìgbàgbọ́ is what it is, and the onísègùn said what they said. What the objections do is narrow the conclusion: the Yoruba terms mark provenance in a way the English terms do not, and how much epistemic weight the tradition actually places on that distinction in practice is less settled than the book's presentation implies.

What it says that Western epistemology does not

Three things, stated plainly.

Where information came from is a permanent property of it, worth marking in the concept. English lets provenance drop out once justification is established. Yoruba keeps it. In a culture whose knowledge is transmitted orally, keeping track of the chain matters more, and the vocabulary reflects that. This is not a primitive feature. It is a more informative classification, and modern concerns about the provenance of claims in a world of mass information circulation make it look less exotic than it did in 1986.

Knowing is an achievement with a history, not a state. Ìmọ̀ is what you have done, gone and looked, tested, understood. The Anglo-American conception can be satisfied passively, by being suitably related to a fact. The Yoruba conception as reported is active throughout, and it fits a tradition in which knowledge is inseparable from competence: the onísègùn's knowledge is what he can do, and the babaláwo's is what he has been trained to perform.

Epistemology and ethics are not separate departments. Hallen found the same interlocutors treating moral and aesthetic evaluation as one subject, and the criteria for good character as statable and defensible in the same way as criteria for knowledge 6. Adepoju's ojú inú, the inward eye, likewise runs perception, critical thought, intuition and moral discernment along a single scale 5. Where the Western tradition after Hume has worked hard to keep facts and values apart, the Yoruba vocabulary does not make the division, and the tradition treats good judgement as one capacity exercised across domains.

For the reader who was told this heritage had no intellectual content, the summary is short. A community of practitioners with no writing, working in an oral tradition, distinguished knowledge from belief by criteria they could state, applied them consistently, defended them under questioning from two professional philosophers, and produced a scheme that Quine thought worth writing a foreword about. Whether they got epistemology right is a live question. That they were doing it is not.