The return of applied epistemology

The term ‘applied epistemology’ has been in irregular use for some time. It has occasionally been associated with pre-existing disciplines or practices: critical thinking, or the information sciences, or casuistry. But most often it simply invokes an analogy, direct or implicit, with applied ethics – for instance, when looking for a label for the activities standing to traditional epistemology and meta-epistemology as applied ethics stands to normative ethics and meta-ethics (Battersby 1989). And since applied ethics has been a well-known going concern for decades, the analogy does work by feeding our imagination: it highlights the many ways in which we might regard philosophical work as constituting applied epistemology. But the fact that applied ethics was also consciously launched by way of critique of normative ethics and meta-ethics is also useful; here the analogy flags potential concerns with the way the analytic epistemological tradition has developed.