Ontology is the systematic investigation into the meaning of ‘existence’ and related matters. Epistemology is the systematic investigation into the meaning of ‘knowledge’ and related matters, such as assertion, thought, belief, justification, reference, rationality and many other concepts. So far I have defended a new realist ontology that is in line with the recent return to speculative thought in that it assumes that there has to be unproblematic access to the meaning of ‘existence’ that is not distorted by our very attempt to make it explicit and defend it coherently against objections. This means that I have claimed knowledge; in particular, I have claimed to know various things, such as that the world does not exist, that there is a plurality of fields of sense, that to exist is to appear in a field of sense, and so on. The recent return to speculative thought so far has not focused on what it means to claim speculative knowledge in philosophy. In this and the following chapter I will give an account of knowledge that corresponds to ontological pluralism. I shall defend epistemological pluralism, by which I mean the view that there are different forms of knowledge, such as sociological knowledge, mathematical knowledge, sensory and epistemological knowledge. These forms of knowledge differ not just by being about different kinds of objects or different fields of sense, for that matter. They are individuated by more specific conditions, such as the condition that we cannot know anything by hearing it without using the sense or combination of senses needed for hearing that something is the case. This condition does not hold for the knowledge just articulated, as it does not claim to know by hearing it that we can only know something by hearing it under specific conditions. Across the cases I am interested in, ‘knowledge’ refers to propositional or factual knowledge, that is, to knowledge that something is true about something. I will [319] not discuss the question whether there are non-, pre-, or sub-propositional forms of knowledge, such as practical know-how, or knowledge by acquaintance. Accepting a version of this would be a different form of pluralism about forms of knowledge — one I am not discussing here.
In epistemology we claim knowledge about knowledge. This has lead many epistemologists to assume that there has to be unified treatment of all instances of ‘knowledge’ and relevant cognates at least with respect to propositional factual knowledge.1 In this context, phrases such as ‘our knowledge of the world’, or just ‘knowledge of the world’, are widespread and are used to characterise knowledge as such, knowledge in general. The background picture is one in which there is the world in the sense of the totality of facts to which we try to refer in such a way that we can successfully claim knowledge in general, ranging from knowledge about penguins to knowledge about up-quarks or knowledge about ancient Chinese warfare. However, Stanley Cavell, Michael Williams and to some extent Bernard Williams have rightly pointed out that the idea of knowledge as such might be overgeneralised. Cavell and Michael Williams, in particular, have begun to question the idea that epistemology is about the relation between the world as such and knowledge as such. However, despite the correct observation that we should not look ‘at the world as though it were another object’, Cavell continues referring to ‘reality’ or ‘the world’, only adding that we have to assume ‘a relation to reality which is not that of knowing’. He calls this the ‘truth of skepticism’ and reads Heidegger and Wittgenstein as having responded to this truth by undermining the idea of a general relationship between knowledge and the world. I take it that Michael Williams’ assault against ‘epistemological realism’ has a similar upshot: if ‘knowledge’ is not itself a unified natural kind about which we can come to know certain facts in epistemology, we might have space for manoeuvres that undermine scepticism in the schematic general form of the claim that we cannot know anything about the world precisely because the conditions of said knowledge somehow cannot be satisfied for whatever reasons the sceptic might have on offer.