• epistemic •
Pronunciation: e-pi-stem-ik • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Adjective
Meaning: Cognitive, pertaining to knowledge or knowing.
Notes: Today's word has slipped out of the realm of philosophy into the practical vocabularies of investments and marketing. It comes with an adverb, epistemically, and two nouns, referring to the study and theories of knowledge, epistemics and epistemology. English episteme refers to what is accepted as intellectually certain knowledge in a given period.
In Play: Epistemic is a formal way to express "about knowledge": "We are still exploring the epistemic potentialities of artificial intelligence (AI)". We probably shouldn't allow it into the general vocabulary in sentences like this: "Herman had a high epistemic threshold of the bank robbery since he was in the bank at the time it occurred.'
Word History: Today's Good Word comes from Greek episteme "knowledge, knowing", which combines epi "(up)on, over" + histasthai "to stand", hence what we stand over mentally, we command, know. Epi comes from PIE epi/opi "near, at, by", traces of which are found in Sanskrit api "also, too", Armenian en "and, also", Lithuanian apie "about", Latvian pie "at, on", and Russian o(b) "around, about". Histasthai was passed down from PIE sta- "to stand", which also went into the making of Russian stoit', Polish stać, Czech stát, Serbian stajati, Danish stå, Dutch staan, and German stehen, all with the meaning of the English verb stand. (Now a standing e-ovation for George Kovac, editor of the GW series and very active Agoran, who spotted the interest in today's sparkling Good Word and shared it with us.)
