The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Engineering

Diane P. Michelfelder, Neelke Doorn, Diane P. Michelfelder, Neelke Doorn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351996556
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Engineering has always been a part of human life but has only recently become the subject matter of systematic philosophical inquiry. The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Engineering presents the state-of-the-art of this field and lays a foundation for shaping future conversations within it. With a broad scholarly scope and 55 chapters contributed by both established experts and fresh voices in the field, the Handbook provides valuable insights into this dynamic and fast-growing field. The volume focuses on central issues and debates, established themes, and new developments in:

• 
  
  

• Foundational perspectives

• 
  
  

• Engineering reasoning

• 
  
  

• Ontology

• 
  
  

• Engineering design processes

• 
  
  

• Engineering activities and methods

• 
  
  

• Values in engineering

• 
  
  

• Responsibilities in engineering practice

• 
  
  

• Reimagining engineering

The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Engineering will be of value for both students and active researchers in philosophy of engineering and in cognate fields (philosophy of technology, philosophy of design). It is also intended for engineers working both inside and outside of academia who would like to gain a more fundamental understanding of their particular professional field.

The increasing development of new technologies, such as autonomous vehicles, and new interdisciplinary fields, such as human-computer interaction, calls not only for philosophical inquiry but also for engineers and philosophers to work in collaboration with one another. At the same time, the demands on engineers to respond to the challenges of world health, climate change, poverty, and other so-called "wicked problems" have also been on the rise. These factors, together with the fact that a host of questions concerning the processes by which technologies are developed have arisen, make the current Handbook a timely and valuable publication.

PART I
Foundational Perspectives

1
WHAT IS ENGINEERING?

Carl Mitcham

Any regionalized philosophy must make some effort to identify what it wants to think about, its subject matter. “What is science?” is a key question for philosophy of science. “What is religion?” is a key issue in philosophy of religion. Such questions are sometimes called demarcation problems. Philosophy of engineering, likewise, must at some point seek to identify engineering and mark it off from near neighbors, that is, other dimensions of experience from which it can be distinguished.

This is not as easy as may initially appear, because engineering today is a contested concept—indeed, a contested activity. “Engineering” is not a rigid designator. There is no simple answer to what is truly not a simple question. Speaking generally, different answers tend to be given by engineers and by non-engineers. (In like manner, scientists do not always agree with the definitions of science given by non-scientists, nor do those who describe themselves as religious always like identities constructed by others.) Additionally, engineers and non-engineers do not always fully agree among themselves. In the present case, the question concerning engineering will be explored by considering a selective spectrum of responses along with their strengths and weaknesses.

1.1. Engineering Accounts

One engineering response to the question is represented by the British Royal Academy of Engineering web site: “Engineering covers many different types of activity. Engineers make things, they make things work and they make things work better” (www.raeng.org.uk/publications/reports/engineering-and-economic-growth-a-global-view). Interestingly, few national engineering academies—not even the International Council of Academies of Engineering and Technological Sciences—provide a definition of engineering. However, expanding on the Royal Academy description, a scholarly apologia for engineering authored by two engineers and a sociologist argues at length that engineering is the making of “ingenious devices” and is coeval with the origin of the human species.

In its earliest form, engineering involved the making of stone tools and other artifacts to aid in human survival [see also Chapter 2, “A Brief History of Engineering” by Jennifer Karns Alexander, this volume]. During the ensuing millennia, the manufacture of ingenious devices expanded and contributed to the shaping of civilizations, to the establishment of human institutions, and to the enhancement of standards of living. Now, in the 21st century, engineering may be viewed as a profession which involves creative thought and skilled actions related to conceptualizing, planning, designing, developing, making, testing, implementing, using, improving, and disposing of a variety of devices, invariably seeking to meet a perceived societal interest.

(Harms et al. 2004: v)

Nuclear engineer and philosopher Billy V. Koen goes even further in an extended, detailed, systematic argument regarding the essential human activity. According to Koen, engineering is defined by its method, which is “the use of heuristics to cause the best change in a poorly understood situation within the available resources” (Koen 2003: 59). Expanding, “a heuristic is anything that provides a plausible aid or direction in the solution of a problem but is in the final analysis unjustified, incapable of justification, and potentially fallible” (Koen 2003: 28). In effect, every decision that humans make to change things is engineering. “To be human is to be an engineer” (Koen 2003: 7, 58, italics in the original both times).

One strength of this view is that it presents engineering as crucial to being human and thereby justifies the importance of engineers. It is the basis of a strong philosophy for engineers, helping them explain and justify themselves to non-engineers (who, on Koen’s account, are actually engineers without realizing it). A weakness is virtually the same: it turns so much into engineering that there doesn’t seem to be anything left out. It fails, for instance, to distinguish between the editing of a poem (deleting or replacing words for better ones) and the engineering of a roadway. Even if all engineering is heuristics, does that mean all heuristics is engineering? Additionally, it fails to account for the very specific curriculum that engineering schools teach to engineers. A strong philosophy for engineering is not necessarily the same as a well-developed philosophy of engineering.

1.2. The Word “Engineering”

As has often been noted, the term “engineering” is of a distinctly modern provenance that challenges an expansive definition. In the Harms, Baetz, and Volti quotation in the previous section, “engineering” is derived from the Latin ingeniosus. From the earliest times, some humans have been described as ingenious—but not all humans. In fact, it was a rare person who was termed ingenious. Vitruvius’s De architectura (1st century BCE) distinguishes the ingenious (hand-working) artisan (Greek tekton) from the architekton or architect, who supervised building. In Shakespeare’s Troiles and Cressida (Act II, Scene 3), it is the great warrior Achilles who is referred to as a “rare enginer.”

The first group of people to whom the word “engineer” was consistently applied were designers and operators of “engines of war.” Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), for instance, was often referred to differentially as engineer, architect, or painter in order to emphasize, respectively, his military, civilian, or aesthetic activities. Later in the Leonardo century, Tommaso Garzoni (1549–1589), in an eccentric compendia of professions, further differentiated the engineer from the mechanic: the former working primarily with the mind, the latter more with hands.

Although etymology cannot resolve the philosophical issue of what engineering is, it does indicate that the concept emerged at a particular time, suggesting that the activity to which it refers was something historically new. The newness of the word and, by implication, activity is further endorsed in the founding of the British Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), the oldest professional engineering society. When in 1828 the ICE applied for a Royal Charter, King George IV requested an identification of that to which this new institution was to be dedicated; he needed a legal solution to the demarcation problem. He was given, and used in the charter, what has become a classic definition: Civil (meaning all non-military) engineering is “the art of directing the great sources of power in nature for the use and convenience of man” (or, we would now say, “humans”).

Three observations can be made about this definition: First, the qualifier “civil” was necessary because, as already noted, at that time engineering was a military profession in the Corps of Royal Engineers. Engineering was undergoing a shift from military to civilian affairs precisely during that historical period in which civil society as a whole was both expanding and being transformed by the rise of the bourgeois class and capitalist political economy. Engineering participated in and contributed to that transformation. Second, the “great sources of power in nature” were assumed best revealed by the new natural philosophy that conceived the physical world in mechanistic terms. Third, the aim of “use and convenience” echoes a theory of morals associated with the thought of John Locke (1632–1704) and David Hume (1711–1776). More consideration of the second and third points can help further reflection on the demarcation question.

There are a number of strengths and weaknesses of this classic ICE definition. It has certainly functioned well in promoting a legitimating professional self-understanding of English-speaking engineering. However, because it makes engineering virtually synonymous with human benefit, it has also served to short-circuit critical reflection.

1.3. Engineering, Applied Science, and Technology

Engineering has often been described as involving modern natural science—a view that is implicit in the ICE definition. Indeed, an ICE-commissioned concept paper by Thomas Tredgold from which the classic definition is drawn makes this explicit by describing engineering as “that practical application of the most important principles of natural philosophy which has in a considerable degree realized the anticipations of [Francis] Bacon, and changed the aspect and state of affairs in the whole world” (italics added). (The complete text, from the minutes of an 1828 ICE meeting, is available in Mitcham 2020: 368–369.) Bacon (1561–1626) had argued for creation of a new approach to knowledge production that stressed its practical utility. “Human knowledge and human power meet in one [but nature] to be commanded must be obeyed” (Novum organum I, 3). Tredgold’s paper built on this view and maintained that it was through the new mathematicized science of hydraulics that the Dutch had separated engineering from hydraulic architecture. Similar claims regarding mathematicization are often made for conceiving of modern technology as (at least in part) applied science, that is, putting science to work. In considering what engineering is, then, it is appropriate to dig deeper into the extensive discussion of possible relationships between science, engineering, and technology.

Consider the polysemic term “technology.” In an extensive historical examination of this “odd concept,” Eric Schatzberg (2018) notes a plethora of closely related terms—“mechanical arts,” “applied arts,” “useful arts,” “industrial arts,” “industrial techniques”—with different usages among, for example, social scientists, engineers, and humanists. For historians, anthropologists, and other social scientists, “technology” tends to be co-extensive with material culture. Like historian Lewis Mumford’s preferred term “technics” (Mumford 1934), it covers not just tools and machines but everything from clothing, shelter, utensils, utilities, and decorative objects of craft and art to mega-artifacts such as monuments, transport infrastructures, and communication networks—in short, all physical things made by humans. As social scientists have long argued, there are a host of underappreciated interactions (mediations) both ancient and modern between social orders and technologies.

Carl Mitcham (1994) has likewise argued for a typology that recognizes technology not just as objects but also as distinctive forms of knowledge, activity, and even volition. In their conceptualization of technology as craft object, for instance, anthropologists often describe artisanship knowledge as manual skill. In the words of French physical anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan (1993: 254–255), “in preindustrial societies the individual level of technicity was relatively high [because of lives] filled with manual activities of many kinds,” whereas contemporary technicity has been “demanualized.” British cultural anthropologist Tim Ingold, taking Mitcham’s typology as a starting point (Ingold 2000: 295ff.), provides further phenomenological descriptions of craft making (Ingold 2013) as the background against which engineering comes into relief as a unique form of technology as knowledge, activity, and even intention. Simplifying, hand-craft artisans are less explicitly motivated than engineers to transform; instead they seek to live in expressive harmony with the world. Yanagi Sōetsu’s classic account of The Unknown Craftsman (1972) richly describes how mingei, or the “hand-crafted art of ordinary people,” is based in aesthetic appreciation of the material qualities of utilitarian objects such as bowls and cups.

For engineers, however, “technology” can paradoxically serve both as an umbrella term including all forms of engineering and to name something less scientifically based but still related. An “institute of technology” (such as MIT) teaches multiple types of engineering; yet engineers simultaneously contrast their more intellectual work to the manual skills of technologists or technicians who install, operate, and maintain what has been engineered. A bachelor of engineering degree requires greater knowledge of science than an associate degree in engineering technology; the former is more likely to be awarded by a university, the latter by what in the U.S. is called a “community college.” (Mixing things up, American technicians are in Great Britain often called “engineers”; in Germany and Austria, Techniker can sometimes be translated as “engineer”; and even in the United States, the operators of railroad locomotives and other large mechanical devices such as heating plants can be called “engineers.”)

According to a widely quoted statement attributed to the pioneering aeronautical engineer Theodore von Kármán (1881–1963), “The scientist describes what is; the engineer creates what never was” (Allibone 1980: 110). For von Kármán, engineering creation nevertheless utilizes scientific knowledge. In his words,

In thermodynamics, … theoretical discoveries preceded by many years the actual production of engines and similar hardware. Similarly, the development of the theory of electromagnetism occurred long before some engineers saw how to apply it to create the electrical industry. And, of course, atomic theory preceded practical applications by several decades. In aerodynamics, … the discovery of the fundamental laws of lift [gave] us the first real understanding of what makes flight possible, and … set the stage for the amazingly swift progress to follow.

(von Kármán 1967: 59)

Despite its specialized accuracy, von Kármán overlooks how thermodynamics also arose through work by the Fre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Foundational Perspectives
• Part II Engineering Reasoning
• Part III Ontology
• Part IV Engineering Design Processes
• Part V Engineering Activities and Methods
• Part VI Values in Engineering
• Part VII Responsibilities in Engineering Practice
• Part VIII Reimagining Engineering
• Index