"A brilliant mind": Margaret Egan and social epistemology

Library Trends, Spring, 2004 by Jonathan Furner

ABSTRACT

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 first appearance of the term "social epistemology." After Egan's death, Shera has often been credited for the idea of social epistemology. However, there is ample evidence to show that it was Egan who originated the concept--one that is commonly viewed as fundamental to the theoretical foundations of library and information science.

1. INTRODUCTION

In the April 1952 issue of Library Quarterly (LQ), Margaret Egan and Jesse Shera of the University of Chicago's Graduate Library School co-published what came to be regarded as a seminal article in the history of library and information science (Egan & Shera, 1952). Seven years later Egan had died, and Shera was left to develop the arguments begun in 1952 (see, for example, Shera, 1960, 1968a, 1970a). Over the last half century, citations have occasionally been made to the original article; more often than not, however, the citations have been to Shera's sole-authored publications in which he refines the ideas presented in 1952. It is Shera's name that seems to have become associated in common consciousness with the ideas contained in the original article. Yet there are indications--deriving in part from Shera's own statements--that Egan deserves rather more credit than she has historically received. In this article, I examine the hypothesis that it is time for the balance of credit to be redressed. I begin by summarizing the contributions made in the 1952 article; I will then outline the methods that may be used in determining the nature and extent of Egan's intellectual influence on Shera. I conclude with an evaluation of Egan's oeuvre.

2. "FOUNDATIONS OF A THEORY OF BIBLIOGRAPHY"

Essentially, what Egan and Shera do in "Foundations of a Theory of Bibliography" is to identify a gap in the disciplinary landscape and fill it with the "new discipline" that they call "social epistemology" (Egan & Shera, 1952, p. 132). They situate social epistemology on the one hand in relation to economics and on the other in relation to sociology, psychology, and traditional epistemology (Egan & Shera, 1952, pp. 132-133). Just as economics emerged as a theoretical framework for the study of the production, distribution, and utilization of various kinds of material products, Egan and Shera propose social epistemology as a theoretical framework for the study of the production, distribution, and utilization of intellectual products (Egan & Shera, 1952, pp. 133-134). They also invoke Parsons's structural-functionalist analysis of individual action in terms of three "modes of orientation"--the cognitive, the goal-directed, and the affective--to conclude that, while sociologists study goal-directed and affective behavior at the social level, psychologists study goal-directed and affective behavior at the individual level, and traditional epistemologists study cognitive behavior at the individual level, in no existing field have scholars attempted to study cognitive behavior at the social level, despite the primary importance of the cognitive mode in determining the structure of society (see table 1) (Egan & Shera, 1952, pp. 130-132).

The object of study of the cognitive mode is the process by which the actor attempts to know (or, as Egan and Shera put it, to enter into a relationship of "knowing" with) the particular situation in which the action takes place. They thus define social epistemology as "the study of those processes by which society as a whole seeks to achieve a perceptive or understanding relation to the total environment" (Egan & Shera, 1952, p. 132, emphasis in the original).

It is specifically at this social level that what Egan and Shera distinguish as the instruments of graphic communication and the instruments of bibliography play important roles (Egan & Shera, 1952, p. 128). By "graphic communication" Egan and Shera denote the means by which actors come to know situations that are beyond their immediate perceptual experience; by "bibliography" they denote the means by which the knowledge of individuals may be coordinated and integrated so that society as a whole may "know" in a transcendent way. Today we would refer to the instruments of graphic communication as documents; the instruments of bibliography are services such as libraries, indexes, and information retrieval systems. These are the intellectual products whose production, distribution, and utilization are the objects of analysis of the new discipline.

For Egan and Shera, the goal of engaging in social epistemology is to lay the foundation for intelligent social action, by making it possible for systems of bibliographic services to be planned and implemented at the national level, so that individual components are coordinated and integrated rather than separated among distinct groups of users (Egan & Shera, 1952, p. 134). Egan and Shera propose three areas of inquiry as contributing to the achievement of that goal (Egan & Shera, 1952, pp. 135-136). The first of these is what Egan and Shera call "situational analysis," what we might today call "information needs analysis," in which methodologies are to be developed for classifying situations on the basis of the information needs exhibited by the people who typically find themselves in those situations. The second area of inquiry is what Egan and Shera call "analysis of information unit," what we might today call "knowledge organization," in which methodologies are to be developed for classifying documents on the basis of their content. Egan and Shera recognize that the results of this kind of analysis are essential not only for the development of automated information retrieval systems but also for the compilation of statistics on the production, distribution, and utilization of documents. The latter--essentially a call for the application of methods of measurement, which we would now refer to as "bibliometrics"--forms the third area of inquiry making up the new discipline (Egan & Shera, 1952, p. 134).