Is "traditional knowledge" knowledge?

A problem of definition and the quest for what counts as well-justified true belief

The confluence of certain currents inside the decolonial and environmentalist movements has breathed new life into the old, romantic idea that the beliefs and traditions — as beliefs and traditions, and because they are beliefs and traditions — of the so-called “ancestral” or “originary” peoples should be granted a status, in academia, in educational systems and in the formulation of public policies, commensurable to that of the established sciences.

Depending on whom you talk to, in front of which audience, and at what moment, the meaning of “commensurable” in the above paragraph can vary enormously in scope and strength. It can be patently reasonable. And it can be anything but.

For instance, it can be taken to mean that the cultural values and ecological relationships to which those peoples are accustomed should be taken into account by policymakers and researchers, rather than dismissed by technocratic fiat. It can be taken to mean that well-established traditional beliefs about the properties of plants, local natural cycles, and the behavior of animals should be taken seriously at first brush and then respectfully investigated with the more methodical tools of science.

But it can also be taken to mean that the seal of “tradition” or “ancestrality” bestows an epistemic value identical (or even superior) to that of scientific investigation. That the beliefs held by elders or shamans are as factual as scientific results, and if they contain errors which scientific thinking would usually correct (for instance, insisting on the undue anthropomorphization of natural phenomena), science should refrain from doing so and either remain silent or embrace the “new paradigm”.

In short, that calling traditional beliefs “traditional knowledge” is not just a figure of speech or a convenient approximation, but an affirmation of fact: that such beliefs are knowledge in the same way science is.

Now, if you are a hard-core social constructivist, you might see nothing wrong here. Socially speaking, “knowledge” is anything a politically empowered community of epistemic arbiters decides it to be: in the social scene of the modern world, chemists are the politically empowered arbiters of chemistry, physicists of physics, climatologists of climate, and so on. That’s, our friend constructivist would argue, is what peer review is all about.

On the other hand, if it so happens that the social scene is Italy in the 17th century and the properly recognized arbiters of physical truth are Roman Catholic cardinals, then it's knowledge that the Sun goes around the Earth. The opposite became knowledge only when the power of epistemic arbitration about celestial stuff passed from priests to astronomers, an eminently socio-political development. So, including “traditional” or “ancestral” or “originary” authorities in the list of recognized epistemic arbiters would be another such development, and a very nice, respectful one to boot.

Of course, what this neat piece of sociologistic obfuscation leaves out is the salient fact that the Earth really goes around the Sun, and not the other way around. It’s not all politics, diplomacy, and power play: reality, the facts of nature as ascertained by experiment and observation, good theory rooted in sound evidence, do matter. The title of knowledge is not “bestowed” like a blue ribbon on a prize pig in a country fair. To be valid, it has to be earned. But earned how?

To properly define knowledge is a famously hard philosophical problem. It seems that everybody who tries sooner or later gravitates back to Plato’s original suggestion in his late dialogue “Theaetetus”, that knowledge is best defined as “true judgment with an account”, usually rephrased as “justified true belief” (Plato wasn’t delighted by his own solution to the problem, but he let it stand as a placemarker — one that is still there 2,300 yeras later).

So, to count as knowledge, a proposition has to be (1) something someone believes in, (2) that corresponds to the facts, and (3) has a justification — a rational explanation for why and how it is to be believed. We can make the definition stricter by demanding that true beliefs, to count as knowledge, should be not only justified, but well-justified: not any hackneyed “explanation” is to be accepted. If I tell you that I know that the Earth orbits the Sun because a gnome confided it to me in a dream, the truth is that I don’t know what I am talking about.

The varied toolbox known by the general name “the scientific method” was developed over the last five or six centuries, specifically to help humanity distinguish between false beliefs that seem true and those that really are, and to craft and recognize good explanations and valid justifications. To test the correspondence between hypothesis — provisional beliefs — and the facts of nature is what science is all about.

It begins with common sense, drawing on the cognitive apparatus already available to small children — the capacity to ask questions, tentatively answer them, test the answers, observe, and repeat — and builds from there, becoming more complex as it learns to learn from mistakes, recognizes fallacies, and identifies blind spots. There is nothing else like it. Its products are not always true, and its justifications are not always good, but it has the best track record of any other system.

Human experience shows that tradition — the fact that something has been considered true for a long time by some community or authoritative class — can’t hold a candle to science when it comes to justifying beliefs about how nature works.

The shape and movement of the Earth are examples, and I’ve written about others, but the main point is that a belief about the world can become part of a culture or of the sense of identity of a people for several reasons — it may be psychologically or socially useful, it may be aesthetically pleasing, it may help people to make sense of stuff, it may serve the ideological interests of elite groups within that particular culture or society, it may just have been adopted at some point in the past by happerstance or historical contingency; and, yes, it may even be true. But that, correspondence to the facts in the world, is just one small possibility among many. The only way to determine the nature of the case is through proper scientific investigation. As I wrote about the “evil spirit” theory of disease, even if the belief “works” in some way, without applying scientific methodology, one cannot guarantee that its observed apparent success is due to a correspondence with reality.

Any history of oppression or victimization of the community that holds the tradition is irrelevant in this context. It may carry moral weight, but it is of no epistemic value towards establishing what is or is not the case regarding testable propositions about reality. That’s important: most of the arguments in defense of the equivalence between traditional belief and science are thinly-disguised appeals to good sentiments and even post-colonial guilt.

Traditions may be suggestive and even informative, but on their own, they are insufficient to pass the test of knowledge.