Philosophy of Engineering Flashcards
What is philosophy?
- Peoples commitment and values and outlook on the world
- Disciplined study of beliefs about being and knowledge, about the general nature of things
Why should we care about the philosophy in engineering?
Help us understand the scope and boundaries of engineering practice
Help us understand the assumptions underlying our profession
Engineering education has been dominated by engineering science with its roots in
Logical Positivism
What are value judgements?
An assessment of something as good or bad in terms of one’s standards or priorities
Define ontology:
Concerned with the fundamental nature of the world and of being – in particular with which principles or categories are primary and what derives from them
What are the branches of ontology?
Idealism
Materialism
What is idealism?
Those who start from an idea or mind or consciousness
of some supreme being
What is Materialism?
Those who assert the primacy of matter, of physical
reality
What is logic?
Logic is neither the only basis for accepting a proposition, nor the only way of thinking
What is ethics according to Flew?
An investigation into the fundamental principles and concepts that are or ought
to be found in a given field of human thought or activity.
What are normative ethics?
The investigation of how individuals and organizations ought to behave where moral
considerations are involve
What are meta-ethics?
conceptual inquiries about the logical form of morality, such as the question of whether moral judgement are objective or subjective
Relevant in deciding which sorts of arguments can appropriately be used to support any given belief
Define Heuristics:
- A procedure used to discover or design something, “rule of thumb” approaches that may solve a particular kind of problem but offer no certainty of success.
- They may depend on induction or previous experience.
Define Epistemology:
• Concerned with the theory of knowledge
• Central issues include the nature and derivation of knowledge and its scope and
reliability, all of which are of practical importance for engineering theory and
practice
What are the three main types of knowledge?
- Factual knowledge
- Practical knowledge
- Knowledge of people, places or things
What is rationalism?
- Philosophical theory that all knowledge is generated by rational thought
- The mind thus generates all knowledge
- Knowledge is discovered through reason
- Prioritises theoretical prediction above all else
What is empiricism?
- Philosophical theory that all knowledge is generated through experience
- Knowledge is generated through empirical data collection
- Prioritises data above all else
- The only thing we can trust is our senses / data
What is Existentialism?
• Apply to the work of a collection of philosophers
• Thus not really a theory of philosophy
• more of a way to reject other philosophies
• Focus of the personal reality over knowledge
• Free Will is key
• ‘Subjectivity’ is truth
• Finding self and the meaning of life through free will, choice,
and personal responsibility
What is logical positivism?
- All knowledge comes from data of experience
- Radical view: All assertions about moral, aesthetic and religious values were meaningless, as they could not be tested.
- A branch of Empiricism
- Theories and laws were not knowledge, but rather computational devices
What is post-modernism?
• All human understanding is interpretation (through social, historical or political viewpoints)
• No interpretation is final
• A branch of relativism
• No such thing as ‘truth’
… this is not an approach that seems likely to appeal to an engineer attempting to decide whether or not a particular design is ready to go into production…
What does science refer to?
All knowledge learnt
What is the scientific method?
The scientific method is the empirical gathering of knowledge through observation, generating hypotheses, gathering empirical data and updating the hypotheses
Who are the two philosophers who brought about dynamic issues of change to science?
Karl Popper
Thomas Kuhn
What was Karl Popper known for?
Introduced the concept of ‘Falsifiability’ as central to the philosophy of science
Karl Popper argued
• That scientific knowledge moved forward through falsification
• A number of hypothesis are created
• These hypothesis are critically tested with empirical data and rationale
• A number fail, leaving space for new hypotheses or the remaining strong ones
• Knowledge could never be ‘positively justified’, only not falsified yet
• Any idea that cannot be falsified is not scientific
What was Thomas Kuhn known for?
- Argued that science undergoes ‘paradigm shifts’.
- Science is not linear
- Proceeds by paradigm shifts
- Interspersed with ‘filling in the gaps’
What in engineering and science are essentially different? (PPP)
- Practices
- Purposes
- Personnel
