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Engineering as Willing
The contingency and intentionality of design

Engineering as Willing

aletheist
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Joined: Feb 06, 2009
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Posted 11/04/09 - 11:06 AM: Subject: Engineering as Willing	#1
This is my long-delayed fourth thread on the philosophy of engineering. The previous ones addressed the engineering method (here), engineering knowledge (here), and engineering rationality (here). As always, I look forward to your feedback. Science is widely perceived as an especially systematic approach to knowing; engineering could be conceived as an especially systematic approach to willing. The transcendental precepts of Bernard Lonergan (1957; also here) may be adapted to provide the backdrop for this assessment. Attentive experience, intelligent understanding, and reasonable judgment lead us to adopt beliefs about how the world was in the past and is now; considerate deliberation and responsible decision lead us to make choices about how the world will be in the future. This framework recognizes the interactions between knowing and willing, as well as their distinctions, which become evident when comparing the scientific and engineering methods. Scientists observe natural phenomena, propose hypotheses in an effort to explain them, and conduct careful experiments to test their theories. Although the will is implicitly involved, the intellect is primary, because the goal is ideal: additional "objective" knowledge. According to Billy Vaughn Koen (2003), engineers engage in "the use of heuristics to cause the best change in a poorly understood situation within the available resources." Although the intellect is implicitly involved, the will is primary, because the goal is pragmatic: some "subjective" outcome; knowledge serves mainly as a necessary but insufficient means to that contingent end. In fact, as Steven L. Goldman (1991) notes, technology and innovation are generally dominated by market-driven value assessments, rather than by technical knowledge. Even when managers or clients are engineers by training, the decisions that they make inevitably reflect the agendas and priorities of the organizations that they serve--not necessarily the capabilities and limitations of the engineers whom they supervise or retain. As a result, engineering tends to be instrumental in nature; it is utilized by non-engineers to achieve their own objectives, which may be quite arbitrary. In other words, the willfulness of engineering is both enabled and constrained by the willfulness of the institutions that appropriate it. Koen claims that a heuristic is "any plausible aid or direction in the solution of a problem that is in the final analysis unjustified, incapable of justification, and potentially fallible." This formulation seems to concede too much to the dominant tradition in Western culture, which--as Goldman (1990) points out--favors certainty and universality over probability and particularity; i.e., abstract knowledge over concrete know-how. While heuristics cannot be "proven" in the absolute sense, their utilization is legitimately warranted, frequently on the grounds of successful past implementation. Each individual engineer has a unique collection of relevant heuristics at his or her disposal, along with "meta-heuristics" for selecting which heuristics are most appropriate in a given set of circumstances. When these are combined to facilitate translating a client's technical and non-technical requirements into a viable solution that adequately accounts for uncertainty and satisfies all applicable constraints, they constitute what William Addis (1990) calls a design procedure. This is analogous to a scientific hypothesis; however, seemingly identical design procedures can have diverse outcomes, and different ones can produce quite similar results. Most design procedures include the development of mathematical models that are supposed to capture the important aspects of reality. The engineer's challenge is to ascertain what those features are, and what assumptions and simplifications can safely be incorporated in order to keep everything manageable, while still yielding a meaningful assessment of likely performance. Although analysis of a model is usually straightforward, conforming to fundamental principles derived from science, its initial construction and subsequent adjustment require "the conscious use of skill and creative imagination"--the dictionary definition of art. The bottom line is that engineering is not deterministic; it routinely involves selecting a way forward from among multiple options when there is no one "right" answer. Consequently, the concept of engineering rationality is a bit of a misnomer; engineering intentionality is a more appropriate term. Design--in fact, all human behavior--is ultimately governed by motives, rather than reasons. Although common usage treats these two terms as virtually synonymous, the prevalence of the latter in both ordinary and philosophical discourse reflects an ancient prejudice that subordinates practice to theory and action to contemplation; i.e., willing to knowing. Engineers exemplify willing, and thus should strive to resist and reverse this tendency.
"Be attentive, Be intelligent, Be reasonable, Be responsible." - Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984)

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