epistemic regime

plural epistemic regimes

1. Any pattern or system (including any ideology, philosophy, religion, science, or tradition, as well as coexistent combinations thereof) by which people know or believe (or believe that they know) the things that they know or believe (including any ontologic or cosmologic facts, theories, hypotheses, catechistic items of faith, or other items of faith).

   Holonyms: reality, world, World, universe, Universe

   5 more examples

   Meronyms: science, research; ideology, philosophy; tradition, received wisdom; ethics, morality; theology, theism, theosophy, religion; credo, creed; agnosticism, atheism, antitheism, apatheism, igtheism < belief system

   Near-synonyms: epistemology, epistemics; cosmology, ontology

   The terms epistemology and epistemic regime aren't as complex or abstruse as people might imagine; both address the overlapping questions of "how people know what they know" and "why people believe what they believe." Epistemology is both the study of those questions and the answers found by such study (both senses are common), and epistemic regimes are the contexts that shape those answers.

   Over the past decade, resilience has become a quasi-universal answer to problems of security and governance, from climate change to children’s education, from indigenous history to disaster response, and from development to terrorism. This article places the proliferation of resilience in relation to the earlier proliferation of security discourse and practice. Why resilience today? It answers this question by unpacking the epistemic regimes that underpin the move to resilience. Rather than tracing the differences between protection, prevention, pre-emption and resilience, the article argues that the political transformation that resilience entails becomes explicit in relation to the promise of security.

   2014, Claudia Aradau, “The promise of security: resilience, surprise and epistemic politics”, in Resilience, volume 2, number 2, →DOI, pages 73–87

   My analysis begins with a remarkable essay that Jonathan Rauch wrote for National Affairs in 2018 called "The Constitution of Knowledge." Rauch pointed out that every society has an epistemic regime, a marketplace of ideas where people collectively hammer out what's real. In democratic, nontheocratic societies, this regime is a decentralized ecosystem of academics, clergy members, teachers, journalists and others who disagree about a lot but agree on a shared system of rules for weighing evidence and building knowledge.

   2020, David Brooks, “Opinion: The rotting of the Republican mind: When one party becomes detached from reality”, in New York Times, retrieved 19 Apr 2021

   Synonyms: epistemology, epistemics, cosmology, ontology