Overlap Without Subsumption: A Conceptual Account of the Relationship Between Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge

Introduction

“What is the relationship between scientific and Indigenous knowledge?” This question is standardly answered by first settling a prior one:

“Does Indigenous knowledge count as science?”

That move is natural, but mistaken, and seeing why it is mistaken is the necessary first step toward answering the question that was actually asked. To ask whether “Indigenous knowledge”—an immense, and heterogeneous body of practices, belonging to many hundreds of distinct peoples—“is” science is to commit a category mistake of a familiar shape. It treats “science” as the name of a single genus with a fixed essence, membership in which some general criterion could settle once and for all, and it treats “Indigenous knowledge” as a single mass comparable, as a whole, to that genus—rather as if, having been shown every college, laboratory, and library of a university, one still asked where the University itself was to be found. Both suppositions are false. As Ludwig et al. observe, “a focus on demarcation obscures the complex relations between epistemic communities” that any adequate account of the relationship must instead illuminate (2024, p. 1221).

My thesis is a positive, not merely critical one:

The relationship between scientific and Indigenous knowledge is a relation of partial ontological overlap, to be established a posteriori and kind by kind, between bodies of practice that share the constitutive marks of knowledge as such while differing, often for good reason, in the objects, purposes, and forms of life to which they answer.

I defend this thesis in three stages. In Chapter I, I argue that the traditional demarcation question—whether Indigenous knowledge is science—is conceptually confused. It rests upon an untenable essentialist conception of science, and conflates the constitutive features of knowledge with the historically contingent institutions of modern scientific practice. In Chapter II, I develop Ludwig’s account of ontological overlap, arguing that the relationship between scientific and Indigenous knowledge is best understood as an empirical question concerning shared property clusters rather than a conceptual verdict concerning scientific status. Finally, in Chapter III, I draw on Verran’s notion of “epistemic disconcertment”, and Harding’s account of epistemic plurality, to argue that comparison between knowledge traditions cannot proceed from a supposed “God’s-eye standpoint”, but must instead emerge from careful engagement between particular practices and forms of inquiry.

I conclude that, once this conceptual grammar is made explicit, the traditional demarcation question dissolves, leaving only the comparative task of determining, property cluster by property cluster, where scientific and Indigenous knowledge genuinely overlap and where they appropriately diverge.

I.

Why the Question “Is Indigenous Knowledge Science?”

Is Conceptually Confused

Consider first the grammar of the word science. It is tempting to infer that it names a natural kind, whose boundary a sufficiently careful definition could draw once, and for all;

But the history of science will not support this.

Harding observes that Galileo, Newton, and Boyle were to themselves, and to their own contemporaries, “natural philosophers,” since the term “science” itself was not coined until the early nineteenth century (2015, p. 93). If paradigm instances of what we now call science were recognised as intellectually respectable before the concept of “science” existed, the concept cannot be doing the work the demarcationist project requires of it:

Picking out, by some antecedently fixed essential mark, a kind that was simply “there” all along, awaiting the correct label. What in fact happened, and continues to happen, is that a shifting family of institutions, and methods, came to be gathered under one historically contingent label.

It is worth distinguishing two quite different questions that are often run together:

One concerns the conditions under which a body of belief deserves to count as knowledge at all;

The other concerns the ontology that different knowledge traditions disclose.

Reliability, responsiveness to evidence, and correction in the light of further experience are criteria for calling something knowledge, partially constitutive of the concept itself. Laboratories, peer review, mathematical formalism, and controlled experimentation, by contrast, are historically contingent institutional forms through which modern science pursues those epistemic virtues. Their absence is no more evidence against a tradition’s epistemic standing, than the absence of a stethoscope is evidence against a physician’s diagnostic skill. A methodological definition of science, therefore, cannot rescue the demarcationist project any more successfully than an essentialist one:

It merely mistakes particular social arrangements for the nature of knowledge itself. Pigliucci’s insistence that Inuit knowledge “does not qualify as ‘science’ by any standard understanding of the word” because it is local, rather than universal (2021a, as cited in Ludwig et al., 2024, pp. 1225–1226), and his further claim that Indigenous science “is pseudoscience, and as such has no place in the university” (2021b, as cited in Ludwig et al., 2024, p. 1228), depend precisely upon that confusion between the constitutive marks of knowledge and the institutional forms of modern science.

II.

Ontological Overlap:

Ludwig’s Alternative Framework

If the demarcationist question is badly formed, what question should replace it? Ludwig (2016) supplies a precise answer that presupposes no settled essence on either side. His starting point is a modest claim about kind terms generally: “kind terms often refer to empirically discovered property clusters” (p. 37). Different knowledge traditions may identify and investigate the same stable cluster of properties while organising them within different conceptual schemes and for different practical purposes. Tzeltal Maya and Western zoologists use different names, Balam and Panthera onca, and know different things about the animals so named; nevertheless both terms answer to the same underlying cluster of behavioural, anatomical and ecological properties. The resulting relationship is what Ludwig calls ontological overlap (2016, p. 38).

The distinction matters because it concerns ontology rather than epistemology. Ludwig is not claiming that Indigenous and scientific communities employ identical methods of inquiry, nor that they justify beliefs in the same fashion. Rather, they sometimes succeed in referring to the same kinds of things despite differing methods, vocabularies, explanatory aims and practical interests. Overlap therefore concerns what is being tracked, not how it is tracked. Once this distinction is appreciated, the relationship between traditions becomes an empirical question rather than a conceptual verdict. Ludwig’s own examples make the point concrete. Inuit observations of Arctic fox feeding strategies and the polynyas used by wintering eider ducks supplied Western biologists with information unavailable from general ecological models alone, improving both population estimates and conservation planning. The success of collaboration depended not upon one tradition being absorbed into the other, but upon both independently tracking the same property clusters.

The same conceptual apparatus that explains successful collaboration also explains principled divergence. Knowledge traditions are shaped by different purposes and therefore attend to different kinds. Yucatec Maya soil classifications track depth, drainage and stoniness because those properties matter for cultivation in a particular environment, whereas international scientific taxonomies organise soils according to different explanatory interests. Ludwig further considers the case where a kind exists within one knowledge system but not another. In such cases the disagreement is not merely empirical. The second tradition has no reason to treat the relevant particulars as forming a single kind in the first place. No amount of additional observation alone resolves the difference because the dispute concerns which property clusters are worth recognising as unified objects of inquiry. The relationship between scientific and Indigenous knowledge is therefore a mosaic: overlap where both traditions successfully track the same kinds, principled divergence where they do not. Which relationship obtains is not something philosophy can determine in advance; it must be discovered a posteriori, kind by kind.

III.

Epistemic Disconcertment and the Limits of a “God’s-Eye” View

Verran’s analysis of encounters between Aboriginal and scientific knowledge traditions complements Ludwig by explaining why attempts to adjudicate such differences from outside both traditions are philosophically misguided. Reflecting on a disagreement between a Yolngu fire-maker and a visiting scientist over whether two plants were “the same,” she argues that the temptation is always to occupy the standpoint of “a removed, judging observer with the gods’-eyes view,” thereby explaining one tradition in terms of categories supplied by the other. Such moments instead generate what she calls epistemic disconcertment: the productive experience of finding that familiar conceptual distinctions no longer settle the matter. Rather than suppressing that discomfort by retreating to an allegedly neutral framework, Verran proposes that participants interrogate their own knowledge practices and ask how they know, what kinds they recognise, and why those kinds matter. Her account therefore converges with Ludwig’s in an important respect. Both reject the search for a universal standpoint from which the relationship between knowledge traditions can be settled once and for all. Comparison proceeds instead from within particular practices, where overlap and divergence alike become empirical discoveries rather than philosophical stipulations.

This also illuminates Ludwig’s political notion of ontological self-determination. If overlap is something discovered rather than presumed, then traditions that do not overlap in a given domain cannot simply be redescribed as incomplete approximations to scientific ontology. Treating Indigenous knowledge as legitimate only insofar as it can be translated into Western scientific categories mistakes integration for assimilation. Harding’s discussion of Micronesian navigation and Cree goose-hunting reinforces precisely this point. These traditions satisfy the ordinary criteria by which any body of belief counts as knowledge while remaining organised around practical ends, social relations and environmental responsibilities that Western scientific ontology neither captures nor needs to capture. Her call to “level the epistemological playing field” (2015, p. 93) is therefore best understood not as a claim that all traditions are secretly forms of science, but as a recommendation to abandon the gatekeeping ambitions of demarcation altogether and instead investigate, tradition by tradition, where ontological overlap genuinely exists.

Conclusion

The upshot is a thesis modest in form, but consequential in implication. Scientific and Indigenous knowledge are related neither as species to genus, nor as rival claimants to a single title, but as partially overlapping families of practice whose points of contact must be established empirically and whose differences frequently reflect distinct purposes rather than epistemic defect. Once this conceptual grammar is made explicit, the traditional demarcation question dissolves—not because it has been answered, but because it was never well formed. What remains is the comparative and empirical task of discovering, property cluster by property cluster, where two traditions genuinely disclose the same kinds of things, and where their differences instead mark distinct but equally intelligible ways of inhabiting and knowing the world.

References

Harding, S. (2015). Objectivity and diversity: Another logic of scientific research. University of Chicago Press.

Ludwig, D. (2016). Overlapping ontologies and Indigenous knowledge: From integration to ontological self-determination. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 59, 36–45. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2016.06.002

Ludwig, D., El-Hani, C. N., Gatti, F., Kendig, C., Kramm, M., Neco, L., Nieves Delgado, A., Poliseli, L., Renck, V., Ressiore C., A., Reyes Galindo, L., Rickard, T. L., De La Rosa, G., Turska, J. J., Vergara-Silva, F., & Wilson, R. A. (2024). Transdisciplinary philosophy of science: Meeting the challenge of Indigenous expertise. Philosophy of Science, 91(5), 1221–1231. https://doi.org/10.1017/psa.2023.127

Verran, H. (2013). Engagements between disparate knowledge traditions: Toward doing difference generatively and in good faith. In L. Green (Ed.), Contested ecologies: Dialogues in the South on nature and knowledge (pp. 141–161). HSRC Press.