The Knowing World: Prologue — The Question We Thought We Knew

We have a familiar way of separating two questions.

Ontology asks what exists.

Epistemology asks how we know what exists.

The distinction seems obvious. First there is a world, already furnished with things; then there are knowers, trying to discover what those things are.

But perhaps the distinction has been doing more work than we noticed.

For the moment we say that ontology comes first, we have already imagined a particular kind of world: a world of things that are what they are independently of how they become available to be known. Knowledge then becomes a problem of access. How does something inside the world come to represent something else inside the world?

But what if this gets the order wrong?

Before there is an object for knowledge, there must be some way in which a difference can become significant. Before something can be known as something, there must be a way of distinguishing it from what it is not. Before a world can be described, there must be some organisation through which what happens can become experience.

Knowing, then, may not be an operation performed upon an already articulated world.

It may be part of how a world becomes articulate at all.

This does not mean that we invent the world. The world pushes back. Our distinctions succeed or fail in relation to something that is not simply of our making.

Nor does it mean that ontology and epistemology are the same question. They are not.

But perhaps they are not as independent as we have imagined.

Perhaps the question is not simply:

How can we know what exists?

but also:

What kind of existence becomes possible to articulate through knowing?

That is a different question.

And it may take us somewhere unexpected.

Because if knowing is not merely the discovery of a world, then we may have to ask what makes knowing itself possible.

The question we thought we knew may turn out to be the beginning of the inquiry.