In “If you think about it, you will see that it is true,” Standing Rock Sioux activist Vine Deloria writes about the tension between dominant Western scientific paradigms and Native ways of knowing. My aim is to introduce this opposition from a metasemantic perspective, as I interpret part of his worry to be rooted in the restrictive nature of scientific language and meaning. I consider some historical problems about how meaning is created and interpreted in Western science, before drawing on Deloria’s writing to recontextualize those problems as relevant to the process of unifying Western and Native ways of knowing.

From Aristotle through Kant, metaphysics has attempted to give meaning to our ideas of the world, its nature, and our knowledge about it. And what a relief it was to hear from Descartes, after all those years of wondering, that I think, I exist! On his part, when he wasn’t reinvesting royalties into luxury properties and plantations, Hume selflessly endeavored to show us that we can know only through sensation, but that what we sense can’t really be known. Such a debt we owe to the European man who withdrew to his office, reclined his chair, and laid down his laws of nature, causation, and cognition. Call this way of creating meaning metaphysics.

So, when whispers circled Vienna about Professor Schlick and the ferociously fascist ideologies to be legislated from the office of the Führer, the region’s finest young minds boarded vessels to North America and established the analytic tradition as we know it. It is no surprise that, determined to lay the foundation for a robust system of scientific knowledge, there would be no room for the dubious metaphysical traditions of their philosophical predecessors. This project was grounded in metasemantics, a complex analysis of the origins and nature of meaning. What do our words describe, and how ought we combine them to form explanations and predictions? A complete science would need to give answers to these questions, and those answers appeared to be, by some degree, a matter of linguistic analysis. As a war brewed, Heidegger said “nothing” and Carnap charged, “nonsense!” (f1).

The positivist project revolutionized the notion of knowledge. But ‘knowledge’ as such is not as it is known by all. Deloria writes, “[science] limits itself by insisting that all data fall within the reigning interpretive paradigm of the time” (pp. 4). The pervading worry in the 20th century analytic paradigm was that people might be making entirely meaningless statements about the world. Verificationism emerged, so all that could be said was that which could be reduced to scientific observation. Those statements deemed “metaphysics” were doomed to be “meaningless” and promptly cast from scientific speak. Deloria’s paper helps us to see the implications of the positivist worry for groups of 21stst century researchers in North America who are opening their departments to integrate Native ways of knowing. From Deloria’s work, we see that part of the tension between Western and Native ways of knowing is grounded in a misinterpretation of the meaning of Native statements about the world, which influences whether they are taken to be scientifically meaningful at all.

The belief that Native talk about the world belongs to the realm of mere metaphysics is partially due to a false perception of the Native community as primitive (pp. 2). Deloria writes that “tribal methodologies for gathering information are believed to be ‘prescientific’ in the sense that they are precausal and incapable of objective symbolic thought” (pp. 2). This is not to say that Native ways of knowing have never interested the Western scientist, only that they do to the extent that they tell her something about the way her own society may have looked had she not figured out how to master the language of describing and predicting nature. She implicitly associates talk of spirits, creators, and the ascription of personhood to inanimate life with the sorts of metaphysical speculation that her science sought to replace. I believe her mistake here is due to cultural biases at the semantic level: Mysticism is literally contained in the English concept of “spirit”; “creator” is historically associated with Adamic traditions. There is no logical space where the English concepts of “living” and “inanimate” might intersect. Thus, as long as she is ignorant of these associations, the Western scientist is inclined to treat any statement which uses this terminology as unscientific.

However, as Deloria points out, “tribal peoples are as systematic and philosophical as Western scientists in their efforts to understand the world around them” (2). The Western Sioux concept of spirit, “Woniya”, helps to illustrate this (2-3). A missionary at Standing Rock Sioux Reservation recounts the Native conception of rocks as “a community of persons with ample locomotion among themselves”, able to “gain the right attitude toward Woniya” (pp. 2). Understood in the English context, this is the sort of statement that could be interpreted as mystical, and therefore not scientifically meaningful. The meaning of Woniya in the context of the Western Sioux, however, is better understood as something analogous to what we refer to in English as “energy” (3). The Western scientist, in identifying this semantic disjunct, may substitute “spirit” for “energy” and realize a “modern theory of energy/matter” not so unlike her own (pp. 3).

It is important to emphasize that, although this helps to identify a language-related issue facing the unification of Native and Western knowledge, the example of “Woniya” as “energy” should not be read as implying a solution to the issue. Identifying differences in meaning should not transform into a project of making sense of Native ideas in our own terms within our own pre-existing conceptual frameworks. My belief is that reconciling differences in meaning cannot be done through impersonal, objective translation. Sharing meaning is social, and it is personal. The unification of Western and Native knowledge needs to be a unification of peoples prior to its being a unification of their theories.That Western and Native world knowledge can be unified requires Western scientists to break free from the constraints of their linguistic comfort zones– they must consider what Native concepts mean in and of themselves rather than in the shadow of English languages and ways of interpreting meaning.

footnote

(1)  See Wendland (2021) for an interesting op-ed about this dispute.

References

Deloria, V. "If you think about it, you will see that it is true." REVISION-CAMBRIDGE MA THEN WASHINGTON- 18 (1996): 

37-44.

Wendland, A.J. (2021). How a debate over “nothing” split Western Philosophy apart | CBC radio. CBCnews. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/how-a-debate-over-nothing-splhttps://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/how-a-debate-over-nothing-split-western-philosophy-aparhttps://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/how-a-debate-over-nothing-split-western-philosophy-apart-1.6268281https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/how-a-debate-over-nothing-split-western-philosophy-apart-1.6268281t-1.6268281it-western-philosophy-apart-1.6268281 

Simpson, L. (2011). Dancing on our turtle's back: Stories of Nishnaabeg re-creation, resurgence and a new emergence. Winnipeg, MB, Canada: Arbeiter Ring Pub..