Episteme

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As distinguished from techne, the Greek word episteme (literally: science) is often translated as knowledge.

Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault used the term of episteme 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. Although Foucault was critical of the term in subsequent writings, he did not disown it, and its use in his original sense has continued.

Foucault's use of episteme has been noted as being similar to Thomas Kuhn's notion of a paradigm, as for example by Jean Piaget, though there are important differences Template:Ref. For example, 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). Moreover, Kuhn doesn't search for the conditions of possibility of discourse, but simply for the (relatively) invariant paradigm governing scientific research. Like Althusser, who draws on the concept of ideology, Foucault goes deeper through discourses, to demonstrate the constitutive limits of discourse. Judith Butler would use this concept on her book on Excitable Speech.

Endnotes

1. Template:Note Jean Piaget, Structuralism (1968/1970, p.132)

References

• Paul Stoller. The Taste of Ethnographic Things. 1989. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA.

See also

• Epistemology

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