Thinking Beyond Bivalence: Ezumezu and the Future Direction of Logic

One of the most illogical developments in the history of logic was the racialization of logical thinking as a capacity exclusive to people of a particular region/race—the West/Caucasians. Those who, by chance or choice, find themselves outside Western society were commonly referred to as ‘barbarians’ and residualized as being incapable of logical reasoning. Traces of this ‘illogical logic’ may be found in the works of Western philosophers like Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, David Hume, Voltaire, and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, to mention but five. The consequence of this racialization of the logic system led to physical brutalization, dehumanization, and in some cases, the extermination of the illogical ‘other’. In intellectual circles, it led to epistemicide and with it, an intellectual exclusion of ‘otherized’ logical systems, which may hold immense promise in world intellectual history. In this poster, I attempt to establish, among other things, that most of the challenges that befuddle the Aristotelian bivalent logical system can best be resolved by non-bivalent logic systems developed in other traditions, for example, Ezumezu’s three-valued logic that makes room for truth-glut that accommodates two extremes in the reasoning process. I demonstrate how the discipline of logic can benefit from trivalent logic systems from Africa in areas like moral thinking and what this holds for the future direction of logic in and beyond the sciences. Lastly, I show how the truth-glut of trivalent logical systems like Ezumezu can be deployed to bypass bivalent moral dilemmas.