Epistemic community

An epistemic community may consist of those who accept one version of a story, or one version of validating a story. Michel Foucaultreferred more elaborately to mathesisas a rigorous epistemesuitable for enabling cohesion of a discourseand thus uniting a community of its followers. In philosophy of scienceand systems sciencethe process of forming a self-maintaining epistemic community is sometimes called a mindset. In politics, a tendencyor factionis usually described in very similar terms.

In international anthropology and studies of global governance, epistemic communities are transnational networks of knowledge-based experts who define for decision-makers what the problems they face are, and what they should do about them.

Most researchers carefully distinguish between epistemic forms of community and "real" or "bodily" communitywhich consists of people sharing risk, especially bodily risk. Some feministscholars and ethicistsare of the opinion that epistemic community follows logosand is thus effectively male.

As this view suggests, it is also difficult to draw the line between these modern ideas and more ancient ones: Joseph Campbell's concept of mythfrom cultural anthropology, Carl Jung's concept of archetypein psychology. Some consider forming an epistemic community a deep human need, and ultimately a mythical or even religious obligation. Among these very notably are E. O. Wilsonand Ellen Dissanayake, an American historian of aesthetics, who famously argued that almost all of our broadly shared conceptual metaphorscentre on one basic idea of safety, that of "home".

From this view, an epistemic community may be seen as a group of people who do not have any specific history together, but search for a common idea of home, e.g. as if forming an intentional community.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemic+community Wikipedia article Epistemic community.