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

Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault used the term 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:

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 noted as being similar to Thomas Kuhn's notion of a paradigm, as for example by Jean Piaget, though there are important differences . 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 in her book Excitable Speech. The similarity between the Kuhnian and Foucauldian notions is undoubtedly because they were both influenced by the French philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard's notion of an "epistemological rupture", as indeed was Althusser.

Endnotes

1. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge (1980, p.197)
2. 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

Philosophical terminology | Epistemology | Philosophy of science | Philosophical concepts

Epistémé | Epistémé | Episteme | Épistémè | Episteme | Episteme