Episteme

Personification of Episteme in Celsus Library in Ephesus, Turkey.

Episteme, as distinguished from techne, is etymologically derived from the Ancient Greek word ἐπιστήμη for knowledge or science, which comes from the verb ἐπίσταμαι, "to know". In Plato's terminology episteme means knowledge, as in "justified true belief", in contrast to doxa, common belief or opinion. The word epistemology, meaning the study of knowledge, is derived from episteme.

Episteme in Western philosophy

Plato and Aristotle

For Plato and Aristotle episteme was a concept for universal knowledge that is true by necessity. In this sense, the objects of episteme cannot change. For Plato, these objects exists in the world of ideas. For Aristotle, episteme is the result of logical reasoning through syllogism. In contrast to the certain knowledge of episteme, doxa can be true in some cases but false in others. Episteme in this classical sense is often translated into English as ‘‘science’’ or ‘‘scientific knowledge.’’

Aristotle defines episteme like this:

"What science [episteme] is . . . will be clear from the following argument. We all assume that what we know cannot be otherwise than it is, whereas in the case of things that may be otherwise, when they have passed out of our view we can no longer tell whether they exist or not. Therefore, the object of scientific knowledge is of necessity. Therefore it is eternal . . . Induction introduces us to first principles and universals, while deduction starts from universals . . . Thus scientific knowledge is a demonstrative state, (i.e., a state of mind capable of demonstrating what it knows) . . . i.e., a person has scientific knowledge when his belief is conditioned in a certain way, and the first principles are known to him; because if they are not better known to him than the conclusion drawn from them, he will have knowledge only incidentally. – This may serve as a description of scientific knowledge."

Here episteme is about the production of knowledge which is universal and invariable. The Enlightenment scientific ideal took its cue from episteme in this classical sense.

The concept of episteme in Michel Foucault

The contemporary philosopher Michel Foucault used the term épistémè in a highly specialized sense in his work The Order of Things to mean the historical a priori that grounds knowledge and its discourses and thus represents the condition of their possibility within a particular epoch. In subsequent writings, he made it clear that several epistemes may co-exist and interact at the same time, being parts of various power-knowledge systems. But, he did not discard the concept:

I would define the episteme retrospectively as the strategic apparatus which permits of separating out from among all the statements which are possible those that will be acceptable within, I won’t say a scientific theory, but a field of scientificity, and which it is possible to say are true or false. The episteme is the ‘apparatus’ which makes possible the separation, not of the true from the false, but of what may from what may not be characterised as scientific.

Foucault's use of episteme has been asserted as being similar to Thomas Kuhn's notion of a paradigm, as for example by Jean Piaget. However, there are decisive differences. Whereas Kuhn's paradigm is an all-encompassing collection of beliefs and assumptions that result in the organization of scientific worldviews and practices, Foucault's episteme is not merely confined to science but to a wider range of discourse (all of science itself would fall under the episteme of the epoch). While Kuhn's paradigm shifts are a consequence of a series of conscious decisions made by scientists to pursue a neglected set of questions, Foucault's epistemes are something like the 'epistemological unconscious' of an era; the configuration of knowledge in a particular episteme is based on a set of fundamental assumptions that are so basic to that episteme so as to be invisible to people operating within it. Moreover, Kuhn's concept seems to correspond to what Foucault calls theme or theory of a science, but Foucault analysed how opposing theories and themes could co-exist within a science. Kuhn doesn't search for the conditions of possibility of opposing discourses within a science, but simply for the (relatively) invariant dominant paradigm governing scientific research (supposing that one paradigm always is pervading, except under paradigmatic transition). In contrast, Foucault attempts to demonstrate the constitutive limits of discourse, and in particular, the rules enabling their productivity; however, Foucault maintained that though ideology may infiltrate and form science, it need not do so: it must be demonstrated how ideology actually forms the science in question; contradictions and lack of objectivity is not an indicator of ideology. Kuhn's and Foucault's notions are both influenced by the French philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard's notion of an "epistemological rupture", as indeed was Althusser. More recently, Judith Butler used the concept of episteme in her book Excitable Speech, examining the use of speech-act theory for political purposes.

See also

• Epistemology
• Phronesis
• Techne

References

• Paul Stoller. The Taste of Ethnographic Things. 1989. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA.
• Foucault, Michel. L'Archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard. 1969.