Three-Valued Logic as an Authentic African Logic: A Critical Reflection

Abstract

The advent of three-valued logic made hitherto rationally unexplainable beliefs to become plausible. Most of the African worldviews were among those beliefs that were considered irrational but thanks to three-valued or many valued logic, there are now explainable and thus rational. The  success of three-valued logic in rendering African beliefs tenable has made a lot of African scholars to clamour for the enthronement of three-valued logic as distinctively African logic. This paper critically reflected on this call by African scholars and discovered both positive and negative implications. In view of these implications, the paper concludes that no one brand of
logic is capable of explaining all the beliefs of a region of the world. Thus, no one brand could be designated as African or Western. There exist a moment of oscillation between two-valued logic and three-valued logic in all cultures of the world. Therefore, no culture can rightly hold to one form of logic as distinctively peculiar to it.