Episteme is in a few dictionaries. It's a new word to me, though I knew of related words like
epistemology. It's apparently pronounced to rhyme with "steamy", not "steam". The online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a
lengthy article on Episteme and Techne, which begins as follows:
Epistêmê is the Greek word most often translated as knowledge, while technê is translated as either craft or art. These translations, however, may inappropriately harbor some of our contemporary assumptions about the relation between theory (the domain of ‘knowledge’) and practice (the concern of ‘craft’ or ‘art’).
Oddly the OED definition ignores the use of the concept by the Greek thinkers, and mentions only the use of the term by the 20th century theorist Foucault. Other dictionaries from the Oxford camp don't seem to have the word at all.
Wiktionary gives three senses of the word - scientific knowledge, its use in ancient Greek philosophy and its use in Foucaultian philosophy.
Contemporary use of the term seems to be more frequent in English language publications in South Asia than in Britain, the US or Australia. Why this should be so, I don't know. For example in
The Island from Sri Lankan in January 2022:
Economics is not a hard science. There are no scientific axioms in economics that can be universally accepted. It all depends upon the economic paradigm or episteme one operates with and within.
I'll add
episteme as a rare word. The closely related term
techne has also been absent from our lexicon. I'll add it too.
