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Exploding Individuals: Engaging Indigenous Logic and Decolonizing Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 January 2020

Rebekah Sinclair
Rebekah Sinclair*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon, Susan Campbell Hall, Eugene, Oregon, 97403
*
Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Despite emerging attention to Indigenous philosophies both within and outside of feminism, Indigenous logics remain relatively underexplored and underappreciated. By amplifying the voices of recent Indigenous philosophies and literatures, I seek to demonstrate that Indigenous logic is a crucial aspect of Indigenous resurgence as well as political and ethical resistance. Indigenous philosophies provide alternatives to the colonial, masculinist tendencies of classical logic in the form of paraconsistent—many-valued—logics. Specifically, when Indigenous logics embrace the possibility of true contradictions, they highlight aspects of the world rejected and ignored by classical logic and inspire a relational, decolonial imaginary. To demonstrate this, I look to biology, from which Indigenous logics are often explicitly excluded, and consider one problem that would benefit from an Indigenous, paraconsistent analysis: that of the biological individual. This article is an effort to expand the arenas in which allied feminists can responsibly take up and deploy these decolonial logics.

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 35 , Special Issue 1: Indigenizing and Decolonizing Feminist Philosophy , Winter 2020 , pp. 58 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © by Hypatia, Inc. 2020

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