'Indigenous Knowledge' Is Inferior To Science

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The view that ‘indigenous knowledge’ counts as knowledge in a sense comparable to real (i.e. scientific) knowledge is absurd but widely held. Moreover it seems to be increasingly dominant in political spaces, and in national and international institutions (such as school curricula, university humanities faculties, UNESCO and the WHO). My concern in this short and rather polemical essay is not to persuade those who hold this view that they are wrong. Rather, I mean to clearly state the rather obvious mistakes in this view so that those who already think there is something wrong with it will be reassured that they are not the only ones to think so. In cases like this, the obviousness of the fact that ‘the emperor has no clothes’ still needs to be repeatedly publicly stated and heard in order for it to be effective, by turning mutual knowledge into common knowledge.

My point is simple: knowledge is knowledge. Where it comes from doesn’t matter to its epistemic status. What matters is whether it deserves to be believed. The scientific revolution has provided a general approach – systematic inquiry into the independent evidential basis of claims (e.g. Strevens 2020) – together with specialist methodologies appropriate to different domains (such as mathematical modeling, taxonomy, statistical analysis, and experimental manipulation and measurement). It is irrelevant that this approach first appeared in North-Western Europe and that many of the domain specific techniques were first developed and refined by white men from the ‘west’. What is relevant is that modern science allows a degree of confidence in factual and theoretical claims about how the world works that has never been warranted before. And it has made this capability equally available to everyone around the world as the new standard for objective knowledge, i.e. knowledge that is reliably true no matter from what perspective you look at it.