First up, the word “epistemic” solves a limitation of the word “knowledge” in that it doesn’t easily turn into an adjective. Yes, like all nouns in English it can be used like an adjective in the creation of noun phrases, but “knowledge state” and “knowledge status” don’t sound as good.
But more importantly there’s a strong etymological reason to prefer the word “epistemic” in these cases. “Epistemic” comes from “episteme”, one of Greek’s words for knowledge[1]. Episteme is knowledge that is justified by observation and reason, and importantly is known because the knower was personally convinced of the justification, as opposed to gnosis, where the only justification is experience, or doxa, which is second-hand knowledge[2].
Thus “epistemic” carries with it the connotation of being related to justified beliefs. An “epistemic state” or “epistemic status” implies a state or status related to how justified one’s beliefs are.
“Knowledge” is cognate with another Greek word for knowledge, “gnosis”, but the two words evolved along different paths from PIE *gno-, meaning “know”.
We call doxa “hearsay” in English, but because of that word’s use in legal contexts, it carries some pejorative baggage related to how hearsay is treated in trials. To get around this we often avoid the word “hearsay” and instead focus on our level of trust in the person we learned something from, but won’t make a clear distinction between hearsay and personally justified knowledge.
Here’s more answer than you probably wanted.
First up, the word “epistemic” solves a limitation of the word “knowledge” in that it doesn’t easily turn into an adjective. Yes, like all nouns in English it can be used like an adjective in the creation of noun phrases, but “knowledge state” and “knowledge status” don’t sound as good.
But more importantly there’s a strong etymological reason to prefer the word “epistemic” in these cases. “Epistemic” comes from “episteme”, one of Greek’s words for knowledge[1]. Episteme is knowledge that is justified by observation and reason, and importantly is known because the knower was personally convinced of the justification, as opposed to gnosis, where the only justification is experience, or doxa, which is second-hand knowledge[2].
Thus “epistemic” carries with it the connotation of being related to justified beliefs. An “epistemic state” or “epistemic status” implies a state or status related to how justified one’s beliefs are.
“Knowledge” is cognate with another Greek word for knowledge, “gnosis”, but the two words evolved along different paths from PIE *gno-, meaning “know”.
We call doxa “hearsay” in English, but because of that word’s use in legal contexts, it carries some pejorative baggage related to how hearsay is treated in trials. To get around this we often avoid the word “hearsay” and instead focus on our level of trust in the person we learned something from, but won’t make a clear distinction between hearsay and personally justified knowledge.