Episteme
"Episteme" is a philosophical term derived from the Ancient Greek word ἐπιστήμη "epistēmē", which can refer to knowledge, science or understanding, and which comes from the verb , meaning "to know, to understand, or to be acquainted with".
Deductive-nomological model
Natural laws, so called, are statements of humans' observations, thus are epistemological—concerning human knowledge—the "epistemic". Causal mechanisms and structures existing putatively independently of minds exist, or would exist, in the natural world's structure itself, and thus are ontological, the "ontic". Blurring epistemic with ontic—as by incautiously presuming a natural law to refer to a causal mechanism, or to trace structures realistically during unobserved transitions, or to be true regularities always unvarying—tends to generate a "category mistake".