English Reference

Word

epistemic

Phoneticsepis·temic

/ˌɛpɪˈstɛmɪk/

Definition

adj. relating to knowledge, how we know things, or how certain we can be about what is true.

adj. concerning the nature, grounds, validity, and limits of knowledge or degree of certainty.

Examples

“Scientists must distinguish between true facts and mere epistemic assumptions.”

“The researcher evaluated the model's epistemic confidence when answering complex legal questions.”

“Calibrated probabilistic models express epistemic humility by assigning lower certainty to queries that fall outside their training distribution.”

Examples

simple

“Scientists must distinguish between true facts and mere epistemic assumptions.”

contextual

“The researcher evaluated the model's epistemic confidence when answering complex legal questions.”

complex

“Calibrated probabilistic models express epistemic humility by assigning lower certainty to queries that fall outside their training distribution.”

Real-World Examples

“We simultaneously consider both epistemic and aleatoric uncertainties, where the former comes from the lack of knowledge about the ground truth (such as about facts or the language), and the latter comes from irreducible randomness (such as multiple possible answers).”
proceedings.neurips.cc · 28 Sept 2024

Etymology

From ancient Greek episteme ('knowledge, science, understanding'), derived from epistasthai ('to know how to do, understand'), from epi- ('over') + histanai ('to stand').

Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Word family

epistemicAdjectiveepistemologyNoun

Domains

AIComputingLinguisticsPhilosophy

This entry

Level
C1 · Advanced
Frequency
Occasional
Updated

Scan code

englishreference.com/q/epistemic

English Reference