meaningmeaning-in-context
Can you guys explain the meaning of the word epistemic and the use of it in a sentence? I cannot relate the meaning that I found to the sentences:
Epistemic – relating to knowledge or to the degree of its validation.
The sentence that I cannot make sense of with the above mentioned definition:
The Black Swan is the result of collective and individual epistemic limitations, mostly confidence in knowledge.
Consider the following sentence:
If you prefer small towns, New York City is a bad place to live.
Now imagine quoting only the part that says:
New York City is a bad place to live.
Strictly speaking, this is an accurate quote, because the quoted part is taken directly from the original sentence with no changes. But it's very misleading, because the quote omits important information that you need to understand what the speaker was really saying. That omitted information is context.
Context is the information necessary to correctly interpret a word or phrase that could otherwise be interpreted in a number of different ways. Without context, the speaker appears to be simply saying that New York is a bad place to live for everybody. When the context is supplied, it's clear that the speaker is only saying that New York is a bad choice for people who prefer small towns. That's why it's unfair to quote someone out of context--to repeat something the person says without enough information to prevent readers or listeners from misunderstanding the true meaning of the quote.
Similarly, if you ask a question about English here, you may be asked to provide additional context, such as an example sentence that illustrates the problem you want to solve. Many words and phrases can have different meanings based on context, so it may not be possible to answer the question without more information that narrows down the possible answers.
You've found a definition of stab, however, look carefully at the Cambridge Dictionary entry:
This is for the verb stab, not the noun. Since the sentence talks about making a stab at something, we need to check the noun definitions.
These definitions don't help either, but, if we keep scrolling down, we'll find the links to idiomatic expressions:
where we learn:
However, we may be able to solve the mystery even more quickly simply by consulting a different dictionary. For example, Macmillan's entry for the noun stab looks like this:
The meaning is found in Definition 2.
By the way, a good way to look up a word in multiple dictionaries is to use OneLook.
Best Answer
Epistemic comes from the Greek epistḗmē (ἐπιστήμη), meaning 'knowledge' or 'understanding'. It's used primarily in philosophy (including the field, Epistemology, that bears its name) as an adjective meaning "related to the abstract concept of knowledge or knowability".
An epistemic limitation, then, is a limitation relating to knowledge or knowability. An individual epistemic limitation would be a limitation of the ability of a given individual to know things, and a collective epistemic limitation is a limit on the knowledge of a society, or of all people.
A full discussion of the Black Swan Theory is beyond the scope of this answer. It is sufficient for our purposes to know that it deals with events that are very difficult or impossible to predict. The sentence is saying that its subject arises because of the limits of what individuals and societies know or can know, and that this is why it is difficult to predict.