Abstract

This paper examines the legitimacy of African knowledge system, in the light of Karl Popper’s Critical Rationalism, with a view to assessing whether or not African knowledge system is capable of legitimate science. Popper defended an attitude of Critical Rationalism as a mark of the natural sciences and formulated a suitable characterization of the empirical sciences. However, in African epistemic system, the dichotomy between science and non-science collide. The paper demonstrates that the current state of African knowledge system delineates it as yet non-science and that African epistemic system, though not yet science in the strict sense, is only capable of legitimate science, if African scientists could adopt the critical attitude proper to science and apply Popper’s falsifiability method of testing of ideas. This paper concludes that Popper’s Critical Rationalism can provide credible ground for development of African epistemic worldview. This paper adopts hermeneutical, expository and textual analytical methods.