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Actually, the phrasing I wrote down is a little different

Reality is a collective hallucination about things of which we cannot speak

What's significant here is not that there are things "which cannot be known," with the attendent implication that there is "back there" somewhere an unknowable.  It is rather that the "out there" cannot in principle be captured in any particular set of words.  

What's being called attention to here (courtesy of Wittgenstein ... "What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence") is not an unknowable thing but rather a limitation inherent in language, and probably in inquiry in general.  If all understandings/stories are inevitably perspective dependent, then there is no way to provide a definitive description of what is out there, ie a description that is  perspective free is unachievable.  And a "hallucination" is not defined as something one sees that is different from "reality" but rather as anything one sees that is known to be perspective dependent or "constructed" (which is to say, on the present argument, everything that is or will be seen).  We are in these terms all "hallucinating," all the time, and always will be. 

An amusing thought experiment motivated by a student question in a class of mine last semester may help to clarify all this.  Supposing one eliminated all of the known "constructions" that the brain is using to yield what we see?  What would "out there" look like in the absence of any of those constructions?  The answer is probably something like this.  What the brain seems to be doing is detecting and giving meaning to small statistical regularities in noise.  The regularities are ONLY statistical and have no meaning in themselves.  On this line of thinking, there is no meaning out there unless and until we give it meaning.  And hence no description of the "out there" other than "noise" (or "chaos"), ie there is no "meaningful" description except one provided by a meaning-maker (of which the brain is one).  

Recognizing this, Wittgenstein's advice is that we remain silent about "reality."  An alternative suggestion that appeals to me more was made by Nelson Goodman who said "The answer to the question "What is the way the world is? What are the ways the world is?" is not a shush, but a chatter."  Goodman's notion is that the absence of a describable reality shouldn't cause us to stop inquiring but instead encourage us to make candidate meanings in lots of different ways and share them to see what new meanings they in turn create.  

We'll talk more about this tomorrow, but that notion of creative and collective meaning making seems to me not a bad way to think of the educational process ... and of life in general.  We're not looking for "reality" but rather engaging in any on going and shared process of creating less wrong hallucinations.