Philosophy of engineering

The philosophy of engineering is an emerging discipline that considers what engineering is, what engineers do, and how their work affects society, and thus includes aspects of ethics and aesthetics, as well as the ontology, epistemology, etc. that might be studied in, for example, the philosophy of science or the philosophy of technology.

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So I'm David Goldberg, and 51 days ago I resigned my tenure at the University of Illinois, to start a consultancy and an executive coaching firm to help transform engineering education in this country and around the world. In the next 6 minutes, I want to tell you a little story about why that's so important to me and why this is important to you. The story begins at the end of World War II, the beginning of what became the Cold War. Engineering education and engineering practice, realigned themselves with the perception that physics won the war, and as a result design and practical subjects were removed from engineering training and in part from engineering practice. Fast-forward to our times, now in the 21st century, and we live in a world that some have said we live in a world that is flat. Richard Florida says that we live in a world with a rising creative class. And Dan Pink says that we live in a world that requires a whole new creative mind. So that gap between the Cold War engineer, post war, and the engineer of the 21st century, could be a big one. And so how can we go about exploring that, and what I would like to do is follow Stephen Covey's advice, and begin with the end in mind. How might we do that? So let's get together with a team of 3 students at the University of Illinois, and go and solve a real world problem as part of an industrially sponsored senior design course. In fact let's go up to Chicago, to Azteca Foods, and try to reduce the amount of dusting flour used. Doesn't sound like a big a problem, but it's a problem that cost that company millions of dollars and causes them to be unprofitable. So we sent the kids off into the field to go talk to the client. And what's the first thing we noticed that they don't know how to do? We noticed that they don't know how to ask a good question. And that's a little surprising, because Socrates taught the Western world to ask good questions in the 5th century BC in Athens, and that's part of our great Western tradition. So how is it that we created engineers that don't know how to ask? So you coach them and you get them to ask those questions, and they collect a lot of data. Then what don't they know how to do? Then they don't know how to label the patterns in the data that will help them solve the problem. And of course that's a little puzzling because Aristotle taught the Western world how to do that in about the 4th century BC. So again, we've lost some of the greatness of the Western tradition in how we teach our engineers how they conduct themselves. Well again, you coach them and you get them to work on the problem, solve the problem you get them to label some patterns, and then they have to figure out what the problem really is and that requires them to model conceptually, either as a categorical list or perhaps as a causal chain. But — their inclination is to plug into equations, because after all that's what we taught them how to do. We taught them to plug into Newton's laws and Maxwell's equations to beat the band, but when actually have to think logically, from step to step, or think decompositionally, they don't know how to do it. Then they actually have a problem to solve, they've kind of modeled it and now they have to bust that big problem up into about a bunch of little problems in order to make some progress, in the course of the semester. In here the failure is a failure that Descartes warned us about in his discourse on method, to decompose problems is the beginning of solving them. And our students have trouble doing that, because they're still looking for that set of equations to plug into and get the magic answer. So you coach them on that. Now they've got little problems to solve and some of those little problems are problems where the quickest way into a solution, the royal row to a solution, is a little experiment out in the world, to query a problem. To query nature and find out what the answer might be rather than to do some theory. So we coach, we prod, we get them to model, we get them to experiment, and they succeed, but their inclination wasn't with them. And so you might call that a failure of your favorite empiricist here, I've chosen John Locke as my poster child. So now they've really got things going and now they really have to come up with a creative solution to the problem and, of course, at the Cold War we've removed a lot of engineering graphics and ideation and creativity from the curriculum, and so they are at a loss as to how to do those things. And so here we might say this is a failure of Da Vinci 101 or Monge 101, depending on which great person you want to pin it on. So again you coach them and get them to sketch, you get them to visualize. And finally, they solve the problem. And they have to present the results to their client, they have to present a report, they have to make a presentation. And what don't they know how to do? Well, this is really akin to the warden in the Cool Hand Luke, saying, "What we have here is a failure to communicate," so we'll tag the great western sage, Paul Newman, with this failure. These 7 things in the iFoundry initiative at the University of Illinois we call, "The Missing Basics of Engineering": the ability to question, the ability to label, the ability to model, the ability to decompose, the ability to experiment, the ability to visualize and ideate and the ability to communicate, are skills that are absolutely essential to be a great engineer. There are also things that are really important, if engineers of our century are going to connect to human problems and connect with humanists, social scientists, artists, and the rest of the intellectual and practical community to help solve these tough problems. And if we do those things, we'll create a category creating engineer who is creative in a way that alignes with the imperative of our century. Thank you. (Applause)

History

Engineering is the profession aimed at modifying the natural environment, through the design, manufacture and maintenance of artifacts and technological systems. It might then be contrasted with science, the aim of which is to understand nature. Engineering at its core is about causing change, and therefore management of change is central to engineering practice. The philosophy of engineering is then the consideration of philosophical issues as they apply to engineering. Such issues might include the objectivity of experiments, the ethics of engineering activity in the workplace and in society, the aesthetics of engineered artifacts, etc.

While engineering seems historically to have meant devising, the distinction between art, craft and technology isn't clearcut. The Latin root ars, the Germanic root kraft and the Greek root techne all originally meant the skill or ability to produce something, as opposed to, say, athletic ability. The something might be tangible, like a sculpture or a building, or less tangible, like a work of literature. Nowadays, art is commonly applied to the visual, performing or literary fields, especially the so-called fine arts ('the art of writing'), craft usually applies to the manual skill involved in the manufacture of an object, whether embroidery or aircraft ('the craft of typesetting') and technology tends to mean the products and processes currently used in an industry ('the technology of printing'). In contrast, engineering is the activity of effecting change through the design and manufacture of artifacts ('the engineering of print technology').

Ethics

What distinguishes engineering design from artistic design is the requirement for the engineer to make quantitative predictions of the behavior and effect of the artifact prior to its manufacture. Such predictions may be more or less accurate but usually includes the effects on individuals and/or society. In this sense, engineering can be considered a social as well a technological discipline and judged not just by whether its artifacts work, in a narrow sense, but also by how they influence and serve social values. What engineers do is subject to moral evaluation.^[1]

Modeling

Socio-technical systems, such as transport, utilities and their related infrastructures comprise human elements as well as artifacts. Traditional mathematical and physical modeling techniques may not take adequate account of the effects of engineering on people, and culture.^[1]^[2] The Civil Engineering discipline makes elaborate attempts to ensure that a structure meets its specifications and other requirements prior to its actual construction. The methods employed are well known as Analysis and Design. Systems Modelling and Description^[3] makes an effort to extract the generic unstated principles behind the engineering approach.

Product life cycle

The traditional engineering disciplines seem discrete but the engineering of artifacts has implications that extend beyond such disciplines into areas that might include psychology, finance and sociology. The design of any artifact will then take account of the conditions under which it will be manufactured, the conditions under which it will be used, and the conditions under which it will be disposed. Engineers can consider such "life cycle" issues without losing the precision and rigor necessary to design functional systems.^[1]

Publications

Books

P. & Gunn A.S. (1998), Engineering, Ethics, and the Environment, Cambridge University Press, New York
Addis W (1990) Structural Engineering: The Nature of Theory and Design, Ellis Horwood, Chichester, UK
Addis W (1986) Theory and Design in Civil and Structural Engineering: A Study in the History and Philosophy of Engineering, PhD Thesis, University of Reading
Bucciarelli L.L. (2003) Engineering Philosophy, Delft University Press, Delft
Bush V. (1980) Science,The Endless Frontier, National Science Foundation Press, Washington DC
Beale N., Peyton-Jones S.L. et al. (1999) Cybernauts Awake Ethical and Spiritual Implications of Computers, Information Technology and the Internet Church House Publishing ISBN
Cutcliffe S.H. (2000) Ideas, Machines and Values: An introduction to Science, Technology and Social Studies, Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, MD
Davis, M. (1998) Thinking like an Engineer: Studies in the Ethics of a Profession, Oxford University Press, New York.
Florman, Samuel C. (1981) Blaming Technology: The Irrational Search for Scapegoats, St Martin's Press, New York
Florman, Samuel C. (1987) The Civilized Engineer, St Martin's Press, New York
Florman, Samuel C. (1968) Engineering and the Liberal Arts : A Technologist's Guide to History, Literature
Florman, Samuel C. (1994) The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, 2nd ed, St Martin's Press, New York
Florman, Samuel C. (1996) The Introspective Engineer, St Martin's Press, New York
Goldman S.L. (1991) "The social captivity of Engineering", Critical Perspectives on non academic Science and Engineering, (ed Durbin P.T.), Lehigh University Press, Bethlehem, PA
Goldman S.L. (1990) "Philosophy, Engineering and Western Culture", in Broad and Narrow interpretations of Philosophy of Technology, (ed Durbin P.T.), Kluwer,Amsterdam
Harris E.C, Pritchard M.S. & Rabins M.J. (1995), Engineering Ethics: Concepts and Cases, Wadsworth, Belmont, CA
Johnston, S., Gostelow, P., Jones, E. (1999), Engineering and Society: An Australian perspective, 2nd Ed. Longman,
Lewis, Arthur O. Jr. ed. (1963), Of Men and Machines, E.P. Dutton
Martin M.W. & Schinzinger R (1996), Ethics in Engineering, 3rd ed. McGraw-Hill, New York
Mitcham C. (1999), Thinking through Technology: The Path between Engineering and Philosophy, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 19–38.
Mumford L. (1970) The Myth of the Machine, Harcourt Brace Javonovich, New York
Blockley, David (1980) The Nature of Structural Design and Safety, Ellis Howood, Chichester, UK. ISBN 0-85312-179-6 (Free download)
Blockley, David (Editor) (1992) Engineering Safety, McGraw Hill, ISBN 0-07-707593-5 (Free download)
Blockley, David (2010) A Very Short Introduction to Engineering Oxford University Press, ISBN 9780199578696
Petroski, Henry (1992) To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design
Petroski, Henry (2010) The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems
Simon H. (1996), The Sciences of the Artificial, 3rd ed. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
Unger S.H. (1994), Controlling Technology: Ethics and the Responsible Engineer, 2nd ed., John Wiley, New York
Vincenti W.G. (1990) What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical History, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Md.
Anthonie Meijers, ed. (2009). Philosophy of technology and engineering sciences. Handbook of the Philosophy of Science. Vol. 9. Elsevier. ISBN 978-0-444-51667-1.
Jeroen van den Hoven, Seumas Miller & Thomas Pogge (2017). Designing in Ethics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 978-051-18-4431-7
Priyan Dias (2019). Philosophy for Engineering: Practice, Context, Ethics, Models, Failure. Springer Singapore. ISBN 978-981-15-1270-4
Carl Mitcham (2019). Steps toward a Philosophy of Engineering: Historico-Philosophical and Critical Essays. ISBN 978-1-78661-126-0

Articles

Philosophy in the Making by Natasha McCarthy Ingenia March 26, 2006
Creed M.J. (1993) "Introducing Structures in a Modern Curriculum", Proceedings of the Conference, Innovation and Change in Civil Engineering Education, The Queen's University of Belfast
Davis, M. (2001) The Professional Approach to Engineering Ethics: Five Research Questions, Science and Engineering Ethics 7 (July 2001): 379-390.
Lewin D (1981) Engineering Philosophy - The Third Culture, Paper to the Royal Society, UK
Mitcham C. (1994), "Engineering Design Research and Social Responsibility", Ethics of Scientific Research, pp. 153–196 and 221-223
Hess, J.L. and Fore, G., (2018). "A systematic literature review of US engineering ethics interventions", Science and Engineering Ethics, 24(2), pp.551-583.
Mitcham, C. and Englehardt, E.E., 2019. "Ethics across the curriculum: Prospects for broader (and deeper) teaching and learning in research and engineering ethics", Science and Engineering Ethics, 25(6), pp.1735-1762.

Notes and references

^ ^a ^b ^c 2nd Philosophy of Engineering Seminar Information
^ Engineering Models Retrieved May 2018
^ Motamarri, Saradhi (April 1992). "Systems Modelling and Description". ACM Software Engineering Notes. 17 (2).

External links

Philosophy in the Making by Natasha McCarthy Ingenia March 26, 2006
Royal Academy of Engineering 'philosophy' and ethics

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