AN ONTOLOGICAL DECONSTRUCTION OF THE ‘EPISTEMIC AGENTS’ IN INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE STRUCTURES

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to provide an ontological analysis of the influence of ‘epistemic agents’ in the determination of our stages, strengths and capacities of reasoning towards the structure of thought and branches of knowledge. It will access the role of ‘epistemic agents’ in the enhancement of intellectual development in African thought. These ‘epistemic agents’ include people, land, water and the entity of nature. The relationship among them is that they are the centre of knowledge, and our level of understanding of them affords us the opportunity to build genuine knowledge and strong social constructions on them. This will add to our knowledge built up as well This stems from the fact that when Africans encounter these ‘epistemic agents’, they either conceive them in terms of their significance, in worship (religions) or in knowledge (traditional, moral, medical, social, science and development). This brings us to the knowledge of them as empirical ‘epistemic agents.’ This paper presents these ‘epistemic agents’ as ‘empiricities’ that undertow the epistemic rules that moved and are still moving the thinking of the people. This paper argues the following, that; (i) Our knowledge of the epistemic rules generating knowledge from these ‘epistemic agents’ is ideologically saturated. (ii) Our linguistic pre-figurative strategies of explanation are not enough to portray our indigenous understanding of them. (iii) The African understanding of these agents has been lost in the myths of rationality and science espoused by the Western dominant cannons, and as such, has been decoupled from the cognitive power of language and formalized systems of thought. The objective of this paper is to emphasize on the notion of ‘epistemic agents’ as the sources of the mental infrastructure of all human branches of knowledge and, more importantly, the foundation for Africa’s selfdevelopment and research. The aim of this paper is to rescue African narratives from primordial silence caused by the suppressive effects of dominant classical traditional protocols and to propose an original development of the ‘epistemic agents’ in the invention of relevant indigenous academic disciplines from our genuine understanding of these agents.