Deliberative epistemology: Towards an ubuntu-based epistemology that accounts for a priori knowledge and objective truth

Abstract

The field of epistemology is concerned with the nature, generation and justification of knowledge as well as the rationality of belief; addressing what makes beliefs justified, what it means to say that one knows something and how one knows it. It has been characterised by many debates such as those between rationalism and empiricism or those between absolute truth and relativism. In light of the often bipolar framing of such epistemic debates, the scholarship on ubuntu contains insights that help advance the idea of a “deliberative” epistemology, which is well positioned to resolve many such tensions. With this idea, which speaks to like-minded approaches that are couched within frameworks such as conversational philosophy and complementary reflection, I add the dimension of discourse (i.e. how we think, speak and therefore do) and show that by applying an alternative discursive lens, an ubuntu-inspired epistemology need not only account for experience and subjectivity, as typically presumed, but can also embrace a priori knowledge and objective truth.