without ever quite succeeding. I do not expect that the word “proposi-
tion” will offer us from the outset an impossible agreement about an
alternative philosophy of knowledge. I seek simply to prevent the phi-
losophy of Science from doing half the work of political philosophy on
the sly. In order for thelogosto return to the center of the City, there
cannot be language on one side and the world on the other, with refer-
ence in between, establishing a more or less exact correspondence be-
tween these two incommensurable entities. This seemingly innocent
solution would in fact only transpose the myth of the Cave and its di-
vision between two irreconcilable universes to the philosophy of lan-
guage. For political ecology, there are not one world and multiple lan-
guages, just as there are not one nature and multiple cultures: there
are propositions that insist on being part of the same collective ac-
cording to a procedure that will be the subject of Chapters 3 and 4.
A very simple example will help us illustrate this crucial point,
which we need in order to conclude but which we cannot develop here
at length.^36 Let us suppose that a cellar in Burgundy invites you to a
wine tasting described as “longitudinal,” because it takes the same
wine over several years (as opposed to a “transversal” tasting that
takes several wines from the same year). Before the vapors of alcohol
have definitively dissipated your reasoning ability, in the course of
an hour or two you are going to become sensitive, in the process of
continually comparing wines, to differences of which you were com-
pletely ignorant the day before. The cellar, the arrangement of glasses
on the barrel, the notations on the labels, the pedagogy of the cellar
master, the progress of the experimental procedure all contribute to
forming an instrument that allows you, more or less rapidly, to acquire
a nose and a palate, by registering subtler and subtler distinctions that
strike you more and more forcibly. Let us suppose that you are then
asked to go into the laboratory and discover, in a white-tiled room, a
complex instrumentation that is said to allow you to connect the dis-
tinctions that you have just sensed on your tongue with other differ-
ences, here recorded in the form of peaks or valleys on graph paper or
a computer screen. Let us now make a much more extravagant hy-
pothesis and suppose that in comparing these two visits we are no
longer using the philosophy of knowledge learned on the benches of
the Cave; that we no longer want to say that the first tasting is subjec-
tive, since it activates in our minds only secondary qualities*, while
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