As distinguished from techne, the Greek word episteme (literally: science) is often translated as knowledge. As distinguished from episteme, the Greek word techne (literally: craftsmanship) is often translated as craft or art. ... Knowledge is information of which someone is aware. ...

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. Michel Foucault Michel Foucault (October 15, 1926 – June 26, 1984) was a French philosopher who held a chair at the Collège de France, which he gave the title The History of Systems of Thought. ... A priori is a Latin phrase meaning from the former or less literally before experience. In much of the modern Western tradition, the term a priori is considered to mean propositional knowledge that can be had without, or prior to, experience. ... In semantics, discourses are linguistic units composed of several sentences - in other words, conversations, arguments or speeches. ... Condition of possibility is a philosophical concept first used by Kant. ...

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 ^[1]. 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. Thomas Samuel Kuhn (July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American intellectual who wrote extensively on the history of science and developed several important notions in the philosophy of science. ... Since the late 1800s, the word paradigm (IPA: ) has referred to a thought pattern in any scientific discipline or other epistemological context. ... Jean Piaget (August 9, 1896 – September 16, 1980) was a Swiss developmental psychologist, famous for his work with children and his theory of cognitive development. ... Invariant may have meanings invariant (computer science), such as a combination of variables not altered in a loop invariant (mathematics), something unaltered by a transformation invariant (music) invariant (physics) conserved by system symmetry This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the... Louis Althusser (October 19, 1918 _ October 23, 1990) was a Marxist philosopher. ... An ideology is an organized collection of ideas. ... Judith Butler Judith Butler (b. ...

Endnotes

1. ^  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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