Abstract
The engineering knowledge research program is part of a larger effort to articulate a philosophy of engineering and an engineering worldview. Engineering is not ‘merely’ applied science. Engineering knowledge requires a more comprehensive conceptual framework than scientific knowledge.
The paradigm shift from the limited scientific epistemology to the broader engineering epistemology involves a problem shift. The scientific inquirer seeks the ‘facts’ of ‘objective’ reality – out there. The participant engineer, embodied in reality, seeks ‘methods’ regarding how to work in the world to bring about a more desirable future.
The demonstration of complementarity and uncertainty in the new physics established the limits of the classical scientific concept of detached, observer-independent inquiry and knowledge. Quantum uncertainty entails that the inquirer is an active participant in the irreversible historical development of reality. Participant engineering inquiry and knowledge are concerned with ‘practical reason’. As Kant pointed out practical reason is about ‘how we should live’ – the defining question of morality. Participant engineering research and development is concerned with ‘the construction of the good.’
In the design of the modern k12 STEM curriculum it is crucial that developers recognize that the engineering representation of inquiry and knowledge requires a broader conceptual framework than is possible in the scientific representation. Efforts to integrate engineering into liberal arts and sciences colleges have stalled due to a failure to properly understanding of the relationship between engineering and science.
The scientific representation of inquiry isn’t self-referentially coherent within the deterministic scientific worldview. The engineering representation of embodied inquiry is self-referentially coherent within a progressively emerging reality.
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Notes
- 1.
At a 2013 meeting of the American Physical Society John Heilbron, Berkeley professor of history of science, reexamined the broader worldview of quantum physicist Niels Bohr: “The primary payoff of his engagement with quantum physics for his wider philosophy was the discovery that multiple truths come… in complementary pairs” (Heilbron 2013).
- 2.
This is the enfolding of the sciences and the humanities into the more general engineering framework.
- 3.
As with the inability of scientific models of inquiry to explain our ‘beginning ignorance’, the Darwinian model is unable to explain how it is that organisms (life), as part of a mechanically deterministic reality, are initially non-adapted.
- 4.
“… the purification of the motive in the ground of our beseeching.” Little Gidding, Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot.
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Bristol, T. (2018). The Engineering Knowledge Research Program. In: Fritzsche, A., Oks, S. (eds) The Future of Engineering. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 31. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91029-1_5
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