Epistemic aspects of social ecological conflict

I have personally been aware of epistemes and of the significance to human affairs, and of differences between them, for as long as my memory allows; of course I haven't always known them by that name. Over my lifetime, and until I was introduced to the work of the cognitive psychologist Karen Kitchener in the early 1980s (Kitchener 1983) I had progressively, and essentially non-reflexively, employed a whole lexicon of different alternatives for roughly the same notion. I probably first used nothing more insightful than 'opinion' to express the concept. After that, I would have progressed, in a pretty random and meandering sort of a way, through ‘point-of-view’, ‘habit of mind’, ‘mental framework’, ‘perspective’, ‘position’, ‘frame-of-mind’, ‘filter’, ‘window-on-the world’, ‘view-of-the-world’, ‘worldview’, ‘prism’, ‘lens’ ‘mental model’, ‘belief system’, ‘meaning-perspective’, 'paradigm' and ‘Weltanschauung’, before eventually encountering, appreciating and embracing the concept of episteme. The central idea that I have come to accept in this regard is that through our experiences in the world, each of us comes to 'see' it (know it) from a particular epistemic position that reflects a set of assumptions about 'reality' to which we subscribe (essentially tacitly) and which finds expression in virtually everything that we do. Our assumptions about the nature of nature, about the nature of knowing and of knowledge, and about the nature of human nature, play themselves out in the way that we behave in the world about us. It follows then that if we are to be more responsible in the way that we treat others along with the planet as a whole, we need to make sure that the epistemic positions to which we each subscribe, and those that characterise the respective cultures in which we are embedded, are adequate and appropriate to that task. And to paraphrase Socrates, first know thy episteme!