Epistemological psychology
The term episteme is related to the Greek word επιστήμη, which translates literally as "standing near or by that which causes" but is often simplified as "knowledge" or "science". By ignoring ego interests the core impetus or the essence of a deed, real or imagined, is recovered.
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".