~ S T R A C T THESTUDY OF SCIENCE AND SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITIES is dominated by philosophies and sociologists. These disciplines naturalIy take different approaches to the subject, the one epistemological and the other sociological. While recognizing the role of society in shaping science, this article emphasizes the way that the epistemology of science influences scientific society. The epistemol...

Margaret Egan (1905–59) taught at the Graduate Library School of the University of Chicago (1946–55) and at the School of Library Science at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio (1955–59). With her colleague Jesse Shera, Egan wrote “Foundations of a Theory of Bibliography” for Library Quarterly in 1952; this article marked the fi rst appearance of the term “social epistemology.” After ...

Bayesian epistemology addresses epistemological problems with the help of the mathematical theory of probability. It turns out that the probability calculus is especially suited to represent degrees of belief (credences) and to deal with questions of belief change, confirmation, evidence, justification, and coherence. Compared to the informal discussions in traditional epistemology, Bayesian ep...