epistemology vs theory

epistemology

noun
  • A particular instance, version, or school thereof; a particular theory of knowledge. 

  • The branch of philosophy dealing with the study of knowledge; theory of knowledge, asking such questions as "What is knowledge?", "How is knowledge acquired?", "What do people know?", "How do we know what we know?", "How do we know it is true?", and so on. 

theory

noun
  • A hypothesis or conjecture. 

  • A coherent statement or set of ideas that explains observed facts or phenomena and correctly predicts new facts or phenomena not previously observed, or which sets out the laws and principles of something known or observed; a hypothesis confirmed by observation, experiment etc. 

  • A field of study attempting to exhaustively describe a particular class of constructs. 

  • A set of axioms together with all statements derivable from them; or, a set of statements which are deductively closed. Equivalently, a formal language plus a set of axioms (from which can then be derived theorems). The statements may be required to all be bound (i.e., to have no free variables). 

  • A description of an event or system that is considered to be accurate. 

  • The underlying principles or methods of a given technical skill, art etc., as opposed to its practice. 

How often have the words epistemology and theory occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )