An intellectual enterprise formally concerned with explaining how knowledge is possible. There are two kinds of epistemology, strong and weak. Strong epistemology begins by considering whether it is possible to know anything at all. What is the relation between SUBJECT and OBJECT, such that the one can know the other? Weak epistemology assumes that knowledge is possible, all too possible. How many ways of knowing can there be, and what can they know about one another? In the critical philosophy of Kant, the task is to define the limits of reason, what it can know of the structure of reality and what it cannot. In the anthropology of de Castro, there is the jaguar and the human, the jaguar for whom blood is beer, and the human for whom beer is blood. The first kind of epistemology is the province of the philosophers, and it is a condition for all work in any DISCIPLINE, a conceptual deference owed by a thinker to a given structure of EXPERIENCE. Its interdisciplinarity is its universality. The second kind of epistemology can be said to be dispersed among the disciplines, and each may attempt to lay claim to its own. For the anthropologist, blood is custom; for the historian, a clue; for the critic, a word; for the jaguar, again, it is beer. How does the jaguar know its beer? A difficult question, but to ask it is to assume already that it does, that there is a discipline of the jaguar, within which beer can be known and even, somehow, said. There are weak epistemologies, which assume that the disciplines of the jaguar and the historian can never intersect. There are strong epistemologies, which allow for translation and transformation, for the critic to know the word as his beer as his blood, and for the jaguar to crouch at the pool of her ink. Epistemology may, on this field of contention, risk losing the last of its a priori authority, devolving into rival perspectives, or discourses, each seeking to remake the other in its own terms (see DISCOURSE). There are two kinds of epistemology, weak and strong.