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This volume contains the abstracts of the Workshop Philosophy & Engineering organised at Delft University of Technology, October 29-31, 2007.
Title: Abstracts of the Workshop Philosophy & Engineering 2007 ISBN/EAN: 978-90-5638-183-7 Year: 2007 Workshop Co-Chairs: Ibo van de Poel, Philosophy, TuDelft David E. Goldberg, Industrial & Enterprise Systems Engineering, UIUC. Workshop Committee: Caroline Baillie (Queens University), Mark Bedau (Reed College and Protolife), Stephanie J. Bird (Science and Engineering Ethics), Taft Broome (Howard University), George Catalano (Binghamton University), Philip Chmielewski SJ (Loyola Marymount University), Ron Chrisley (Unversity of Sussex), Michael Davis (Illinois Institute of Technology), Tony Eng (MIT), David E. Goldberg (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign & ShareThis), Richard Holton (MIT), Billy V. Koen (The University of Texas at Austin), Bocong Li (Graduate University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences), Natasha McCarthy (The Royal Academy of Engineering), Carl Mitcham (Colorado School of Mines), Gene Moriarty (San Jose State University), Joel Moses (MIT), Bryon Newberry (Baylor University), Steven P. Nichols (The University of Texas at Austin), Ibo van de Poel (TUDelft), Bill Taylor (Fairfield University), P. Aarne Vesilind (Bucknell University) Contact Information: Ibo van de Poel Department of Philosophy Delft University of Technology Jaffalaan 5 2628 BX Delft The Netherlands Phone: + 31 15 278 4716 Fax: + 31 15 278 6233 E-mail: [email protected] David E. Goldberg Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering 117 Transportation Building, MC-238 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 104 S. Mathews Ave., Urbana IL 61801 USA Fax: 217-244-5705 Phone: (217) 333 0897 E-mail: [email protected]
Contents McCarthy, Natasha “A world of things, not facts”............................................................ 1
// Robison, Wade “Design problems and ethics”................................................................. 2
Driessen, Clemens “Which Wastewater, Whose Risks?” ................................................... 4
Børsen, Tom “Developing ethics competencies among science students at the University of Copenhagen” .......................................................................................... 6
// Pitt, Joe “Philosophy, Engineering, and the Sciences” ...................................................... 8
Pirtle, Zach “The Philosophy of Science and the Epistemology of Engineering” .................... 9
Doridot, Fernand “Towards an “engineered epistemology” ?”...........................................11
// Bedau, M. “The evolution of technology as seen in patent records” ..................................12
Gedge, Dennis “Practical Civil Engineering and Philosophy”.............................................15
Moriarty, Gene “The Focal Engineering Experience” .......................................................17
// Asaro, Peter “The Ethics of Designing Autonomous Technologies” ....................................19
Kreuk, M. K. de, van de Poel, I. R., Swart, S. D., & van Loosdrecht, M. C. M. “Ethics in Innovation: Cooperation and Tension” .........................................................................21
Veruggio, G, & Operto, F. “The Debate on RoboEthics”...................................................23
// Vermaas, Pieter “What is the use of Philosophy of Engineering? The case of the analysis of technical functions” ...................................................................................25
Vries, Marc J.de “Engineering science as a 'discipline of the particular': but how particular and how general?” ......................................................................................27
Mitcham, Carl, & Mackey, Robert “Comparing Approaches to the Philosophy of Engineering” ............................................................................................................29
// Fox, Andrew, & Crudington, Andrew “Initiating discussions on the Philosophy of Engineering: some results from the UK”.......................................................................31
Koen, Billy V. “Quo Vadis, Humans? Engineering the Survival of the Human Species” .........32
Goldberg, David E. “Why Philosophy? Why Now? Engineering Responds to the Crisis of a Creative Era”.........................................................................................................35
Vincenti, Walter “It Isn’t Rocket Science!”: Changing the Public Perception of Engineering” ............................................................................................................37
Gunn, Alastair “Integrity and the Ethical Responsibility of Engineers” ...............................38
// Zwaag van der , Sybrand, & Kroesen, Otto “Teaching ethics to engineering students: from clean concepts to dirty tricks” .............................................................................39
Didier, Christelle “Questioning the status and stakes of engineering ethics”.......................41
Luegenbiehl, Heinz C. “Principles of Engineering Ethics in the Absence of Moral Theory”...................................................................................................................43
// Farber, Darryl, Pietrucha, Martin T., & Lakhtakia, Akhlesh “Systems and Scenarios for a Philosophy of Engineering” ......................................................................................45
Durbin, Paul “Multiple Facets Of Philosophy And Engineering”..........................................47
Davis, Michael “Distinguishing engineers from other “Technologists”: A case study” ...........50
// Fahmi, Marco “Software engineering and the problem of vagueness”................................51
Abbott, R. “Abstraction in computer science and engineering” .........................................53
Moses, Joel “Architecting Engineering Systems: Craft or Science” ....................................55
Radder, Hans “Are Technologies Inherently Normative?” ................................................57
// Consoli, Luca “The intertwining of ethics and methodology in science and engineering: a virtue-ethical approach”..........................................................................................58
Bowen, W. Richard “Prioritising People - Outline Of An Aspirational Engineering Ethic” ........59
Coeckelbergh, Mark “Imagining worlds: Responsible engineering under conditions of epistemic opacity” ....................................................................................................61
// Li, Bocong “Philosophy of engineering in China” ............................................................62
Ottens, Maarten “A conceptual mismatch between theory and practice in engineering systems” .................................................................................................................65
Hanks, Craig “On the importance of the Philosophy of Technology for engineers” ...............67
// Spier, Ray “Towards a Philosophy for Tools and their Uses: a way forward in “Dual-Use” situations”........................................................................................................68
Fritzsche, Albrecht “Engineering Determinacy - Technology and the exclusion of the determinate”............................................................................................................69
Bernhard, Jonte “Perspectives on use of artifacts in education: Some contributions from …”...................................................................................................................70
Schuurbiers, Daan “Issues to be RAISED: ethical and social considerations in nanotechnology research”..........................................................................................72
Kinderlerer, Julian & Kuan-Ting, Chi “Formulators’ Dilemma: Public Perception, Evidentiary Standards and Distributive Justice in safety design of Nano-cosmetics” ............73
Nikitina, Elena “Techno-socialization of a human being” .................................................75
Bao, Ou “Engineering, Culture and Engineering Culture”.................................................76
Moriarty, Gene “The Focal Engineering Experience” .......................................................77
Wang, Dazhou “The Importance of Engineering to Philosophy” ........................................79
Pieters, Kees “A Critique on Critique”...........................................................................80
Fritzsche, Albrecht “The Dialectic of the Good in Heuristic Optimization - An Example from the Automotive Industry” ...................................................................................82
Koch, Steffen “Engineering, Technology, and our disciplinary Self-image” .........................84
Steen, Marc “Human Centred Design”..........................................................................86
Bucciarelli, Louis L. “Ethics and Engineering Education” ..................................................88
// Fujimoto, Ryoji “Ethical aspects of technical artifacts” ....................................................89
Danielson, Peter “A Collaborative Platform for Experiments in Ethics and Technology” ........91
Evers, Johan, & De Tavernier, Johan “Will nano-enabled diagnostics alter the autonomy of agricultural stakeholders?”.......................................................................93
// Pols, Auke J. K. “Transferring Responsibility through Use Plans” ......................................95
Fisher, Erik, & Lightner, Michael “An Overlooked Responsibility: The Informed Consent of Graduate Engineering Researchers” .........................................................................96
Lavelle, Sylvain “Technology and engineering in the context” ..........................................98
// Broome, Taft “Metaphysics of engineering”...................................................................99
Grimson, William, Murphy, Mike, & Coyle, Eugene “Educating engineers for the 21st century” ................................................................................................................101
Schrijnen, Pieter M. “Leadership in engineering”..........................................................103
Fudano, Jun “Japanese Engineers Meet Western Ethics: The Introduction of Engineering Ethics Into Japan and Beyond” ................................................................105
Authors Index ...........................................................................................................106
A world of things, not factsNatasha McCarthy
Royal Academy of Engineering Policy Advisor, Engineering Policy (with discussion by Peter Kroes, TUDelft, co-author of Between Science and Technology and
Technological Development and Science in the Industrial Age)
ABSTRACT Abstract: When one mentions philosophy of engineering, people often point out that Wittgenstein was an engineer – in order, perhaps, to quell their initial skepticism about the viability of the subject. Although Wittgenstein’s engineering background may have had no direct influence on his philosophy, a comparison between a philosophy of engineering and Wittgenstein’s later philosophical views can demonstrate the validity and value of the philosophy of engineering. In his
later years, Wittgenstein turned to the world, to the context of real human interactions, in order to better understand mind and language and to shed light on previously intractable philosophical problems. If philosophers of science and epistemologists are willing to look at how knowledge is exercised in the world, through the application of knowledge to practical problems, they too will get a better understanding of their subject and will get new insight into problems they have wrestled with for centuries.
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Design Problems and Ethics Wade Robison
Rochester Institute of Technology 23 Lomb Memorial Drive
Rochester, New York, 14623 1. 585.475.6643
ABSTRACT An engineer's decision about what to do to solve a particular design problem does not rest wholly on the crystalline clarity that quantification provides, but on ethical considerations. En-gineers may well blanche at the idea. For, they may think, if the design solution depends, even in a small part, on ethical consid-erations, something qualitative, vague, subjective, and conten-tious will have found its way into that pristine quantitative realm they think is the heart of engineering. Perhaps, some may concede, ethics is relevant to engineering. After all, they would admit, what engineers do can cause harm or produce good. But, they would argue, engineers ought to concentrate on those aspects of their practice which permit quantitative answers and let others consider whatever may be the qualitative and so contentious moral implications of their work. Some engineers may be willing to concede that their practice has moral implications, but eschew letting those impli-cations be a factor in engineering practice since letting such factors in means, they believe, letting into a quantitative area where agreement can be reached issues about which no agree-ment is possible. However mild and reasonable this response may seem, it rests upon a mistaken contrast between engineering and ethics, one that permeates discussions of ethics in engineering texts and, most important, rests upon mistaken understandings of both engineering and ethics. As I shall argue, there is no getting around the idea that ethics is integral to the solution of design problems and thus that the judgment engineers make in solving a design problem is an ethical judgment. This is no doubt far from the common belief of engi-neers. In the Preface to Essentials of Engineering Design, for instance, Joseph Walton tells the reader that the last of the ten chapters of his text "raises ethical questions that an engineer may face from time to time, the non-mathematical problems that need more than a calculator to answer." This remark is typical in two ways: (a) It implies that ethics is not integral to engineering practice, that ethics is not a constant consideration for engi-neers, but rather something engineers need to concern them-selves with only from "time to time." Engineers ought to be ethical, it is realized, and so a (separate) chapter is thus devoted to ethics, but the essential separation of the subjects of engi-neering and ethics is made clear by the segregation of ethics into a separate chapter -- as though ethics were an addendum to good engineering practice and not something that engineers need worry about very much. That the chapter is the last chapter in this book makes the subsidiary role of ethics in engineering emphatically clear. "If you have time to get to it," the author is telling the students and the professor, "you might want to read this since the issues it raises will help you solve problems you will face from time to time." Ethics is not conceived as integral to engineering practice
when it is relegated to the concluding chapter of a text devoted to laying out that practice. (b) Walton's remark implies that ethics and engineer-ing differ fundamentally. Engineering poses the sort of problem that can be solved by using calculators while ethics poses "the non-mathematical problems" for which calculators are useless. Engineering is supposed quantitative while ethics is not. The implication is that that is "so much the worse for ethics" and thus that if ethical issues were a factor in engineering practice, engineering practice would be worse off, muddied by qualita-tive matters. This story of the relationship between engineering and ethics is a popular one, the contrast it depends upon perme-ating our understanding of how the arts and the sciences differ from one another. What is right about it is that one way we achieve the objectivity that is thought to be the hallmark of science, and of engineering, is through quantifying an essen-tially quantitative problem. Knowledge "is what we must think, not what we wish to think," and it is this contrast that marks off what we know from every other mental relationship we may have to things in the world -- wishing, hoping, believing, and so on. What we can know is what can compel such necessity of thought. So knowledge is what is objective, what does not vary in any way that is dependent upon what is subjective -- upon our wishing, hoping, and so on. Mathematical truths are para-digmatic objects of knowledge, and one trademark difference between the sorts of problems the answer to which can be an object of knowledge and other sorts of problems is thus that for the former there is only one right answer, determined, and so made compelling, by the nature of the problem. Since what we know could not be otherwise, anyone who disagrees with the right answer is just wrong. They may wish for a different an-swer, but what we may wish to believe is not necessarily what we can know. What makes other sorts of problems susceptible only of qualitative answers, on this reading, is that their answers are not determined by the nature of the problem as they are for such questions as "What is the sum of two plus three?" They thus do not admit of only a single answer. One person may think The Godfather a wonderful movie, a brilliant exposé of the dark side of American family life, while others may think it terrible, a badly realized vision of a dysfunctional family and society. No single answer is the right answer, it is claimed, because subjec-tive preferences matter with this sort of question -- "Is The God-father a good movie?" It is a value question, the answers to which depend upon preferences, and preferences can differ. Because disputes about such matters are inherently subjective, the argument continues, they cannot be settled. So, it is con-cluded, anyone may think whatever they wish about The Godfa-ther. No one can know who is right. That, it is claimed, is just the way it is with ethics. It is no wonder, given such an understanding of knowledge and of the nature of ethics, that engineers may blanche at the idea that
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ethics is integral to engineering. For it matters that there are right answers to engineering problems, answers determined by the nature of the problem and not by what anyone may wish or hope or prefer. Either a particular metal will survive the stresses when used to fabricate the girders of a bridge or it will not. If it does not, the girders and, presumably, the bridge will not sur-vive. So engineers must calculate -- using a calculator -- the right answer to questions about metals and stress. If ethics were integral to engineering, they may think, the right answers risks being overwhelmed by issues about which there are no right answers. Engineers would still do their calculations, and those would figure in their coming to a decision about the right solu-tion for a design problem, but the calculations could not alone determine the answer. The answer would be determined in part by subjective matters, and bridges would survive the rigors of the stresses they would face only by luck. That is the story that explains why some may think that even if engineering has ethical implications, engineers should not concern themselves with those implications in mak-ing design decisions. But, in fact, we can have knowledge of far more than simply mathematical truths, and neither ethics nor engineering is like what this story says they must be. Embodied in an artifact, an engineering solution will have causal effects,
and we can readily imagine an evil genius of an engineer whose solutions are calculated to cause harm -- from computers in an airplane that take over landings but are programmed to mislead the pilots so as to cause crashes, to new operating systems which are prone to crashes and open to hackers. Any design solution may have harmful effects. A moral engineer will minimize those; an evil genius of an engineer will not. A really perverse evil genius of an engineer will so solve design prob-lems that the more intelligent, knowledgeable, well-trained and motivated someone is, the worst the harms that result. That we can imagine such an evil genius of an engineer means, I shall argue, that ethics is integral to the solution of design problems and thus integral to engineering. It is not an extra for the last chapter of an engineering book, and it is not just that engineer-ing artifacts can have ethical implications. Ethical considera-tions are essential to the design process that is the intellectual core of engineering. describe the formatting guidelines.
Keywords Ethics, design solutions, knowledge, value judgments, quantita-tive, qualitative
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Which Wastewater, Whose Risks? Clemens Driessen
Applied Philosophy, Wageningen University, P.O.Box 8130 6700EW
Wageningen, the Netherlands +31 317484121
ABSTRACT The membrane bioreactor is a technology for treating wastewater currently being developed. Integrating a conventional activated sludge treatment process with membranes, a higher quality effluent can be attained. In order to analyse ethical aspects of this new technology, three different types of networks are distinguished. In these networks the potential risks, responsibilities, and other ethical issues are produced. Instead of treating the ethical characteristics of a new technology as inherent qualities, the dynamic process in which the technology in the networks is demarcated from its context is found to be ethically relevant. Implications for the approach of engineering ethics and for analysing the role of ethical considerations in technology development are sketched.
Keywords Membrane bioreactor, wastewater, risks, ethics, networks.
1. INTRODUCTION 1.1 Ethics and Technology Technology, when analysed from a normative perspective, is not just a neutral means to an end, or only a material solution to a societal problem. Rather technologies can be seen to be part of a process of co-evolution with society. [2] Technology can be ethically relevant, for instance by bringing new risks into being, creating ethical dilemmas, or by redistributing responsibilities, making its development a subject for moral appraisal.
1.2 Engineering Ethics Engineers can have an important role in the co-evolution process of society and technology. Traditional engineering ethics nevertheless has some shortcomings in our technological society, as it is based on the view of an individual decision maker dealing with more or less clear-cut dilemmas. This type of engineering ethics is less appropriate with respect to ethical issues in which many actors are involved and unexpected new risks can come up. [1] In these cases ethical analysis is to be aimed not so much at assigning fixed responsibilities for risks, but more at charting the dynamic of new risks and new responsibilities that can originate with a technology.
2. DUTCH WASTEWATER 2.1 Institutions and Regulations In the Netherlands, a number of governmental institutions deal with wastewater. Municipalities are responsible for parts of the sewage system, while the waterboards – Dutch regional bodies dedicated to water management – are in charge of treating the wastewater. Many surface waters on which the wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) discharge are under the authority of the provinces. National government and the European Union set surface water and WWTP effluent standards. Surface water quality regulations are currently changing, with most notably the implementation of the European Water Framework Directive (WFD). This encompasses a redefining of
surface water quality and regions for assessing these. Apart from the stringent maximum levels of harmful priority substances, the quality of surface water is also defined in terms of ecological standards.
2.2 Conventional Technology Wastewater treatment in the Netherlands since the 1970s is mostly done using activated sludge bioreactors. [4] This treatment is based on an intensification of biochemical processes that can be found in nature, to deal with most of the Phosphorus, Nitrogen, as well as some other harmful substances. Current effluent quality is often not high enough to meet more stringent demands. These can be attained using a sand filter, or potentially by more complicated technology.
3. THE MEMBRANE BIOREACTOR The membrane bioreactor or MBR is a new wastewater treatment technology that combines the biological activated sludge process with integrated membrane modules to separate the effluent from the sludge. As opposed to the conventional activated sludge WWTPs, the MBR does not require separate settling tanks. The membrane filtration improves the quality of the effluent, making the MBR a potential means to comply with the expected more stringent effluent and surface water quality regulations. Engineering consultant DHV together with waterboards, membrane suppliers and research institutes are currently working to develop this technology in the Netherlands. After lab and pilot plant research, and some industrial applications of the MBR system, research on actual MBR WWTPs is undertaken.
4. ETHICS IN NETWORKS
4.1 Three Dynamic Multi-Actor Networks The development of the MBR and its ethically relevant characteristics can be seen to take place in three (different but interconnected) kinds of networks. In the first - the generic R&D network - research institutes, engineering consulting companies, membrane suppliers and prospective users and operators of MBR systems cooperate to develop knowledge of the generic system and to optimise its workings in various circumstances. Potential risks in this network are dealt with by doing research into lessening the effects of harmful events or reducing the chance of them occurring. These risks are only in part a direct characteristic of this new technology, as they will also depend on the way it will eventually be built and operated. Responsibilities in this network are not very clear nor explicitly defined, while potential risks will only come about in actual operative installations. The second network is the one made up around an actually built and functioning MBR wastewater treatment plant. Here the risks and other implications of the new technology take shape. For each installation, which is designed for a specific location and functionality, the responsibilities of engineering consultants, membrane suppliers, construction companies and operators are laid down in various types of contracts. A safely
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operating installation with a certain quality effluent is the objective of the network. Risks are mostly dealt with in the design, for instance by creating redundancies, or taken up as part of the operation and maintenance program. It is only in the third network of wider surface water quality issues where the effects of the utilization of a new wastewater treatment technology become apparent. While in the second network there might be a risk of for instance malfunctioning of a membrane and pollution of the effluent, it is only in the wider context of the plant, the surface water on which it is discharged, that these pollutants will actually pose a risk. While in the first and second network risks are mostly appreciated as costs, for installing redundancies or mitigating effects, in the third network normative implications appear. Here surface water quality is the aim of policies of the various actors. It can be evaluated for different functionalities, such as improving aquatic ecosystems, creating healthy bathing water, or protecting the quality of drinking water intake locations. And in the third network, also other normative considerations than those confined to risks of the installation come into view, such as its higher energy use.
4.2 Moral Dynamics across the Networks In the multiple network perspective it becomes clear that how the wastewater is considered, and who is responsible for risks depends on the framing of issues and the demarcation of technological systems. [3] Viewed from the third network it also becomes clear that WWTP effluent is not the only source of pollution, and risks of the WWTP can be set-off against other policy measures. In many places in the Netherlands combined sewer systems still discharge untreated wastewater on surface water after heavy rains, putting the ethical focus on WWTP risks in another perspective. Investing in R&D for improving effluent quality by the waterboards can then also be part of a strategy to emphasize responsibility of others, in an implicit moral ‘debate’ between those responsible for different sources of pollution in the third network. Framing the WWTP and its associated responsibilities in a different way, it can even be claimed that a WWTP itself is not a source of pollution, but just a medium for pollution of other sources, as one waterboard technologist put it. With the development of the MBR WWTP, new risks are created within the sewage system, as its operation can be hampered by previously unnoticed discharges. One example of this was the substance discharged by a cheese factory that blocked the pores of MBR membranes. While according to Dutch law dischargers are responsible for not harming the WWTP process, they claim it is not their responsibility as it never posed a problem to the conventional installation. The high effluent quality of the MBR makes it a candidate for wastewater reuse schemes, or applying WWTP effluent on surface water with sensitive ecosystems or opportunities for bathing. Risks can then be assessed of the effluent or of the surface water, and differ when approached in the ecological terms of the WFD, or as bathing water. While regulations and
engineers involved still mainly focus on Nitrogen and Phosphorous standards, other substances like E-coli, hormones and heavy metals pose threats in this new situation. In this way risks can increase, while the installation itself is considered safer. Who is responsible for these new risks is unclear, as it can be debated whether they are caused by the new technology, or due to its new role in the water system.
5. CONCLUSION In the research and development process of a complex technological system like the membrane bioreactor, risks, responsibilities and other ethical concerns are part of a dynamic process in three kinds of networks. The importance of various risks, how to assess them and who is to deal with them, are in practice interconnected questions that are partly answered by the co-evolution of institutional structures and technological developments. Addressing these issues is not purely a matter or engineering or politics, but requires the interplay of technical expertise and public deliberation. [5] Explicitly focusing on the demarcation of technological systems from their context and the framing of issues and choices in different networks can be important for understanding the ethical considerations of those involved and in discussing the possible implications of emerging technologies. With the multiple network dynamic in view, the aim of ethical analysis can be to open up these complex developments for debate and to promote the moral sensitivity of those involved as well as outsiders.
6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This paper is based on a Masters thesis in Systems Engineering and Policy Analysis at the Technical University Delft, supervised by Ibo van de Poel and Jeroen van den Hoven. Many thanks to Kees Meinema, Helle van der Roest, and others at DHV for offering a four month research opportunity within their organisation. And to Ibo van de Poel for arranging this research opportunity and for much advice during its execution.
7. REFERENCES [1] Devon, R. & I. Van de Poel. 2004. Design ethics: the
social ethics paradigm. Int. J. Eng. Educ. Vol. 20 (3), 461-469.
[2] Keulartz, J., M. Schermer, M. Korthals & T. Swierstra. 2004 Ethics in a Technological Culture; A Programmatic Proposal for a Pragmatist Approach. Sci Technol Hum Val. 29 (1), 3-29.
[3] Latour, B. Aramis, or the love of technology. Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass. 1996.
[4] Van de Poel, I. Changing Technologies, A comparative study of eight processes of transformation of technological regimes. Twente University Press, Enschede, 1998.
[5] Korthals, M. Ethical traceability and ethical room for manoeuvre, in Coff, Ch., D. Barling. M. Korthals (eds.), Informed Choice and Ethical Traceability, Springer, Dordrecht, 2008, Ch. 11
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Developing ethics competencies among science students at the University of Copenhagen
Tom Børsen Center for the Philosophy of Nature and Science Studies, University of Copenhagen, Blegdamsvej 17, DK-
2100 Copenhagen
ABSTRACT
This paper consists of two parts. In the first part I present ‘post-normal science’. The purpose of this theoretical part is to formulate competencies that post-normal scientists and engineers need to act ethically. In the second part of the paper I present and analyse the course ‘Philosophy of Science and Ethics’ that I since 2005 have taught to biochemistry, chemistry and nanotechnology students at the University of Copenhagen. I discuss whether the course intends to develop the so-called post-normal ethics competencies.
Keywords
Post-normal science. Ethics teaching. Ethics competencies. Case-based teaching.
1. INTRODUCTION Science and engineering graduates can no longer expect a conventional university career with tenure. Neither is it likely that they will remain in the same job at a private business, in a governmental office, or at local authorities for a long period of time.
The jobs they hold will properly be project oriented, and their projects time-limited and involve many different partners representing an array of institutions. If they do research in the public sector their research projects might very well be co-sponsored externally.
Local research quality criteria have emerged, as science and engineering projects are expected to be socially robust (read: useful to stakeholders). Today an array of actors invests cultural and financial capital in research projects, which in return are expected to give returns.
The societal and political context influences the questions taken up by scientists and engineers. Main-stream research projects used to be 'normal' – scientists and engineers were expected to produce clear-cut answers to the questions they investigated.1
1 The term ‘normal science’ is taken from Thomas Kuhn [1]. According to Kuhn, normal science is the most predominant form of academic science; it deals with puzzle-solving in contrast to revolutionary science – another form of academic science – that aims at the development of new theories and reinterpretations of scientific concepts. Normally scientists compete in solving the puzzles defined by the disciplinary matrix under which they work, rather than developing radical
'Certainty expectations' defined, or at least heavily influenced, what kind of research questions scientists chose to scrutinise, and the problems engineers tried to solve: Only puzzles and problems that could be solved with certainty would be labelled ‘scientific’ and worthy of investigation.
Stakeholders' utility expectations today often outdo the conventional certainty expectations. Questions that stakeholders find important cannot (necessarily) be answered with clear-cut certainty. It is difficult for normal scientific and engineering projects to flourish in a context characterised by stakeholder involvement and uncertainty. Hence, the future career prospects for science and engineering students are today qualitatively different than those prevailing say 30 years ago. Today the scientific and technological landscape is conflict-ridden, as tensions between different expectations easily collide in the realm of science and engineering (e.g. certainty versus utility).
2. POST-NORMAL SCIENCE Many philosophers and sociologists of science have tried to understand the profound changes that have occurred in science, engineering and technology. In the first part of this paper I present the work of one such scholar: Jerome Ravetz who, in collaboration with Funtowicz, has developed ‘post-normal science’ [2]. The purpose of this theoretical part of the paper is to formulate the competencies that post-normal scientists need to act ethically.
Post-normal science is characterized by a high degree of system uncertainty and/or high decision stakes. Whether or not GMO foodstuff is dangerous to human health is a post-normal question partly because it cannot be answered with certainty (we neither have the knowledge nor the methods to give clear-cut answers to such questions). Partly because both the private industry, local farmers, grassroots organizations, governmental agencies and others have invested a lot of money as well as their reputation in attempts to cast light on the issue. Post-normal themes are usually political, and hence they often encompass political advice on controversial issues. Post-normal science is not only instrumental, as it also includes value rational elements (cf. Weber).
The characterization of post-normal issues might change over time: Suspicion of a potential threat towards human health
new scientific ideas. In this article the term ‘normal science’ is used in a broader sense, as it does not only refer to standard puzzle-solving within the academic sphere of science. Here ‘normal science’ denotes standard uses of scientific theories and methods within both the academic and applied sciences.
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usually emerges when the uncertainties are high and the decision stakes low, but as knowledge and attention over time increase, the post-normal threat might best fit with a situation where both uncertainties and decision stakes are high, or maybe even with a situation where the uncertainties are low, but the decision stakes remain high. A post-normal issue may also turn normal, where both uncertainties and decision stakes are low, if new scientific methods and knowledge are generated so that uncertainties are reduced, at the same time as consensus is achieved among involved parties on how to handle the issue.
A post-normal environment is like a battlefield where special interests (financial, political, institutional etc.) combat using science as weapons: A combatant supports production of new scientific insight, and rejects, publicly doubts, reinterprets, or puts emphasis on parts of the existing knowledge corpus, that promote its case. Where does this leave the individual scientist? Which competencies does she need to act ethically in such an environment?
To formulate competencies that the post-normal scientist needs to possess in order to perform ethically in a post-normal context one should mention the abilities to fairly portray involved actor’s value systems and underlying assumptions, to synthesize / accept a compromise among these different views, as well as to publicly say no to involvement in projects that she finds in contrast with her ethical orientation system.
2. TEACHING PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE AND ETHICS TO SCIENCE STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN In the second part of the paper I present and analyse the course ‘Philosophy of Science and Ethics’ that I since 2005 have taught to third year biochemistry, chemistry and nanotechnology students at the University of Copenhagen. The course is compulsory and is taught twice a year to increase flexibility. Approximately 100 students per year attend the course. The idea behind the courses is to help the students to see their scientific discipline in a wider context, and to enable them to analyse complex ‘science-in-context’ problems. The course is case-based: Concrete events / problems are analysed, by linking them to more general sociological, historical, philosophical or ethical theories. An important trait of the course is that ethical aspects of science and technology are intertwined with epistemological issues. The rationale behind this synthesis is that scientific analysis, risk assessment and personal involvement are all intrinsic to understand and handle complex science-in-context problems.
The teaching period is seven weeks followed by an oral exam. One week in total is allocated for introduction and closing / evaluation of the course. During the remaining six weeks one case per week is addressed. In each case a concrete problem is presented. The problems are approached as perceived by concrete persons.
In addition to a description of a series of events, each case includes texts that address philosophical, sociological or ethical theories (central concepts) that the students are asked to affiliate to the series of events. To help combine the concrete events and the central concepts, a list of questions is included in each case.
2.1 Course content: Descriptions of the six cases The six cases presented during the course are:
• Jan Hendrik Schön's experiences. Schön was a young promising nano researcher who was found guilty of scientific misconduct.
• The events leading up to the discovery of the DNA structure that earned James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins the Nobel Prize in 1963.
• The controversy of cold fusion. In 1989 two chemists (Pons and Fleishmann) claimed at a press conference that they had observed cold fusion using low tech electro-chemistry equipment.
• The experiences of Ignacio Chapela: A researcher at Berkeley, who published a controversial paper in Nature that concluded that native Mexican maize was polluted with sequences from GM-maize produced by Norvartis and other companies.
• The story of the German chemist Fritz Haber’s involvement in the German chemical weapons programme during the First World War.
• In the sixth case the students need themselves to construct a case that addresses a scientist’s work embedded in a societal context characterised by uncertainty and conflicting values-systems.
3. CONCLUSION The course promotes the ability to recognise, analyse and understand the background / context of post-normal controversies. It also promotes the power to use abstract theories in concrete situations. The course intends to teach the students to distinguish between normal and post-normal science, and choose analytical tools accordingly. The capacity to explicitly formulate and use ones ethical orientation system is also addressed.
All four competencies mentioned above are compatible with the outline of the post-normal ethics competencies.
4. REFERENCES [1] Kuhn, Thomas, 1962. The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [2] Jerome Ravetz, 2006. The No-Nonsense Guide to Science.
London: New Internationalist Book.
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Philosophy, Science and EngineeringJoseph C. Pitt
Virginia Tech Department of Philosophy (0126) Virginia Tech Blacksburg, VA 24061
011-540-231-5760 [email protected]
ABSTRACT The literature in the philosophy of technology is beginning to address engineering, but it is also not very extensive. One could dwell on the reasons for this lack, but it is not clear that would be profitable. Suffice it to say that it appears there remains a hangover of the positivist legacy of concentrating on “pure” science coupled with the perception that engineering is “merely” the application of science to real world problems, and how boring could that be! The fields of engineering contain a variety of topics of interest to philosophers. Among these are: the design process, the nature of engineering knowledge, the social and ethical implications of engineering projects, and the range of relations among engineering and the sciences. I have done some work in the first three areas; in this paper I would like to begin a study of the relations among engineering fields and the sciences. The thesis I propose to explore is this: in so far as Engineering is a critical component of the technological infrastructure of science (see J. C. Pitt. Thinking About Technology, Seven Bridges Press, 200, Ch 8, for an account of the technological infrastructure concept), science is beholding to engineering more than the other way around. If one conceives of human activities as amendable to being placed in some sort of hierarchical ordering, the sciences, taken generally, are usually presumed to be in some sense at the top of the heap. The usual claim is something like “the sciences are our best example of knowledge producing activities.” This claim has been under considerable attack by post-modernists. I
will not be doing that sort of thing. Rather, I will argue that if there is a heap, engineering ought to be at the top of the heap, if we are going to see these activities as related to one another is some way. My argument goes something like this: modern science can only be conducted in the context of a technological infrastructure; while not the only actors in a technological infrastructure, engineers play a more basic role than scientists in this context; in this sense, they are more important. I will be focusing on the roles of individuals rather than making claims about engineering tout court and science tout court or even mechanical engineering and biology. I find it more fruitful to speak about what people do than to reify fields and disciplines as if they have lives beyond the people who constitute them. In this sense then, engineering is what engineers do and science is what scientists do. My inspiration in part comes from two unlikely allies, Gaston Bachelard and Nancy Cartwright. Barchelard argues that scientific ideas are not fully scientific until they can be implemented and Cartwright correctly notes that scientific laws and generalities are not very useful when it comes to doing something in the real world. Getting things done is the objective of human activity and if Bachelard and Cartwright are correct then it is the doers that ought to be our intellectual models. I view the work I am engaged in as part of a common sense pragmatist’s agenda. Key Words Technological infrastructure, common sense pragmatism
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The Philosophy of Science and the Epistemology of Engineering
Zach T. G. Pirtle Consortium for Science, Policy and
Outcomes Arizona State University
Social Sciences Building #204 Tempe, AZ 85287-4401
ABSTRACT Engineers do not simply take the knowledge and
understanding that scientists create and apply it to the world – they generate their own knowledge and in some cases use theories differently than do scientists [1,2]. Engineering epistemology, or the study of engineering theory and knowledge, is an important task for the philosophy of engineering. The task is substantial: in contrast to countless volumes analyzing scientific epistemology, epistemological study of engineering is relatively impoverished. In order to help remedy this gap, this paper will survey recent philosophy of science, by Ronald Giere and Nancy Cartwright, to show how the philosophy of science, no more than science itself, can simply be applied without creative epistemological adaptation to the philosophy of engineering.
To help understand reasons why engineering has been overlooked by philosophers of science, I will present a caricature of a once prominent law-based interpretation of scientific theory, which viewed science as the study of universal, fundamental laws [3,4]. There is reason to believe that the law-based interpretation led to a philosophical neglect of engineering, as some philosophers dismissed engineering as scientifically uninteresting due to its supposed lack of laws [5]. Engineering rules were the simple application of science, with practical advice being determined from the application of laws to specific instances. The law-based approach to scientific theory has, however, come under increasing criticism; defenders of the primacy of scientific laws have had to become much more nuanced, and alternative views of scientific theory have been raised. The lack of analysis of engineering theory still remains.
Philosopher Ronald Giere has offered a model-based account of theory in science, which some philosophers have applied to engineering [6,7,8]. Theories are here seen in terms of theoretical models, which take the central role within science that laws were previously ascribed. A theoretical model is a representational entity that can take many forms, be it physical, visual or conceptual. A model cannot be directly true of the world, but aspects of the model reflect reality, where the degree of reflection is determined in the course of scientific practice, as scientists and engineers judge how similar their models are to real systems.
Giere’s approach is a convenient starting point for new work in engineering epistemology, but it has both strengths and weaknesses. A discussion of theory in terms of models can well describe the developments within the history of engineering, as is true for the work of engineer Walter Vincenti. I will briefly reassess Vincenti’s case studies, including the development of flush riveting methods without reliance on scientific laws, and hold that the knowledge there could be described as model-based. Giere’s account can also help motivate philosophical
study of engineering, as the model-based account removes any epistemological basis for ignoring theory in engineering in favor of scientific ones. Scientific models are seen, by Giere and others, as oriented not toward truth, although they are thought to be in a variety of ways similar to systems in the world. While the actual process by which models are used to examine physical systems can differ, a general account of fitting models to experience can apply just as well to models in physics or engineering, and both kinds of models inherently have a limited realm of application The understanding sought in science is just as bound by human purposes as is the construction of artifacts used in engineering.
Giere’s approach faces two critical problems. First, many consider his use of a similarity criterion to be too broad; as Goodman showed, everything can in some respects and in some degrees be similar to something else. Giere accepts this limit, and makes his account a naturalistic one, which tries to draw on existing social and cognitive science to empirically determine how different models are judged similar to the world by practitioners.
A second problem poses far more serious limitations for understanding engineering. Some philosophers criticize Giere, along with many advocates of the semantic view of theories, for holding that his philosophical account applies to all theory as well as to empirical models [9]. Giere considers accounts of theory in logic to be equivalent to accounts of theory in geology. The notion of a model there is not identical, and attempts to apply Giere’s model-based view to all dimensions of engineering theory might be too broad. But even if this criticism is sound, Giere’s approach still well-describes a particular brand of model-based reasoning in science, and empirical work should be done to see to what types of modeling in engineering this account can apply toward.
There are competing philosophical accounts that still place a heavy emphasis on scientific truth. Nancy Cartwright has been a harsh and influential critic of the importance of scientific laws. Cartwright rejects that fundamental laws are essential to explanations in physics [4]. Specific, realistic knowledge of actual systems is not derived from a few simple theoretical laws; idealized theory is always augmented by observed data, from the “ground up.” One can combine laws together to truthfully describe a set of events, but Cartwright argues that such a combination loses theoretical explanatory power unless one admits that the so-called “fundamental” laws of physics lie. For example, the laws of gravity and electric force can explain events for a set of idealized circumstances, but for them to be able to explain events in experience, the laws must lie, because they must describe events outside their idealizing assumptions. Her alternative account holds that phenomenological laws, or statements made about observed regularities, which describe
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piecemeal parts of reality, are the most important aspects of scientific theory because they describe the truth.
Drawing from this emphasis on phenomenological laws, Cartwright’s larger account of scientific theory is based on the identification of “causal capacities.” Individual laws help describe some of these capacities, but Cartwright holds that the important work to connect a law with reality comes from the relaxation of idealizing assumptions, done in such a way that the capacities reveal themselves. Drawing on this notion, the work of the engineer is to create models that both describe the world and capture these capacities, using these models to tell the truth and make reliable artifacts and accurate predictions. Cartwright’s work could suggest a reversal of the traditional relationship between science and engineering: the scientist is focused on understanding the general causal properties at play in the world. The engineer, however, is the one primarily concerned with truth, with grounding abstract theory into accurate descriptions and predictions about real-world systems. Further, insofar as scientists succeed at creating a uniform account of the world, this success is a result of engaging in engineering theoretical activity, of idealizing our actually quite chaotic and irregular – she calls it dappled – world [10].
Like Giere, Cartwright’s account faces serious criticism. Some philosophers have rejected Cartwright’s emphasis on capacities as being too mysterious, she has worked to make capacities into a useful conceptual tool [11,12]. Further, the argument that the world is more complex than can be captured in a few fundamental scientific laws is not conclusively resolvable, as it rests on metaphysical grounds. It may well be that a few laws could describe the world, but Cartwright offers suggestive reasons as to why empiricists should take the complexity of scientific practice as confirming of her dappled world.
I have used two recent accounts from the philosophy of science and argued for their creative adaptation (not application) to engineering. Both accounts directly reject aspects of the law-based view of engineering that has hindered the philosophical study of engineering. It might also be noted that analytic philosophers of science too often focus solely on epistemological issues, only rarely discussing issues of social relevance [13,14]. For those who want a socially robust philosophy of engineering, the philosophy of science may thus seem to be an unlikely ally. To advocate such an alliance, I suggest that epistemology can be conducted in such a way that it emboldens a powerful, comprehensive and pluralistic approach to the philosophy of engineering. For example, under Giere’s model-based account, no rigorous philosophical demarcation between theory in engineering and science seems possible; this could have strong ethical implications, since ethical arguments about the need to scrutinize and question technology could apply equally as much to so-called basic science. Further, epistemological arguments can help frame
practical discussions of engineering models, offering practical suggestions about the use of such models in society and policymaking (Oreskes et al 1994). Such a focus on engineering could provide new relevance for existing philosophical discussions. In other words, the philosophy of engineering may have as much to contribute to the philosophy of science as vice versa.
1. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am deeply indebted to Andrew Hamilton and Carl Mitcham for their help and ideas, and am grateful for CSPO’s support.
2. REFERENCES [1] Laudan, R. (ed). The Nature of Technological Knowledge:
Are Models of Scientific Change Relevant? Reidel, Boston, 1984
[2] Vincenti, W. What Engineers Know and How they Know It. Johns Hopkins University Press 1988
[3] Bunge, M. Toward a Philosophy of Technology. In Mitcham, C. and Mackey, R. (eds) Philosophy and Technology: Readings in the Philosophical Problems of Technology. The Free Press, 1972
[4] Cartwright, N. How the Laws of Physics Lie. Oxford, 1983 [5] Smart, J. Philosophy and Scientific Realism. 1967 [6] Giere, R. Explaining Science: A Cognitive Approach.
University of Chicago Press, 1988 [7] Pirtle, Z. (draft) A Model-Based Approach to Engineering
Theory. Presentation given at the 2007 Meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Technology
[8] Cuevas, A. The Model-Based Approach for Technological Theory. Techne, 2005
[9] Godfrey-Smith, P. “The strategy of model-based science” Biology and Philosophy 21: 725-740, 2005
[10] Cartwright, N. The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science. Cambridge University Press, 1999
[11] Giere, R. (forthcoming) “Models, Metaphysics and Methodology” in Hartmann. S, Bovens, L., Nancy Cartwright’s Philosophy of Science. Routledge
[12] Cartwright, N. Nature’s Capacities and their Measurement. Oxford University Press, 1994
[13] Longino, H. Science as Social Knowledge. Princeton University Press, 1990
[14] Kitcher, P. Science, Truth, and Democracy. Oxford, New York, 2001
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Towards an “engineered epistemology”? F. Doridot
ICAM de Lille, CETS 6 Rue Auber, 59000 Lille, FRANCE
Keywords Philosophy and engineering, Quine, positivism, new sciences, techno-science.
ABSTRACT In a famous article of 1969 heading “Naturalized epistemology”, Quine pled for a new conception of epistemology related to the natural sciences, and accepting the contribution of the empirical data in its task of comprehension of creation of knowledge. One has also seen in this article a reformulation of the old (and not only positivist) idea according to which the human questionings have often vocation to express themselves initially on the philosophical mode, before the creation of sciences adapted to allow the only possible ojectivation of them. (One can find many examples of this phenomenon in the history of the scientific theories).
But one knows how, all along History (and especially during the 20th century), science and technology have progressively formed an inseparable couple (“techno-science”) making obsolete (or at least difficult) a clear distinction between scientists, technicians, engineers, etc.
It thus becomes natural to wonder up to what point would be relevant today the concept of an “engineered epistemology”, problem which seems to us to be able to cover three types of questions: 1) Up to what point can (or must) philosophical questions be translated into questions of engineering to find a possible form of answer? (with the dependent question: up to what point the ambitions and objectives animating the engineers are, in essence, of a philosophical nature?) 2) Up to what point does engineering convey (or is determined by) philosophical options (tacit or explicit)? 3) Up to what point does engineering adress typically philosophical problems, or engineering problems that can be solved only by a philosophical “detour”?
One proposes to examine some answers to these questions while basing oneself on various examples, drawn from various thematic fields of contemporary engineering (technical infrastructures, but also artificial intelligence, nanotechnologies, etc) and while exploring, in each one of these fields, the precise relationship maintained between engineering and its phenomenology, its ontology, its axiology.
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The evolution of technology as seen in patent recordsMark Bedau Reed College
3203 SE Woodstock Blve Portland OR 97292 +1 503-517-7337
ABSTRACT Bedau and Packard (1992) developed evolutionary activity statistics to reflect the dynamical processes by which evolution is creating adaptations. Here I apply evolutionary activity statistics to US patent records to illustrate the dynamics of the evolution of technology. I also explore the philosophical implications of this work for understanding cultural evolution.
Keywords evolution of technology, cultural evolution, patents, evolutionary activity.
1. INTRODUCTION Bedau and Packard (1992) developed evolutionary activity statistics to reflect the dynamical processes by which evolution is creating adaptations. Here I apply evolutionary activity statistics to US patent records to illustrate the dynamics of the evolution of technology. I also explore the philosophical implications of this work for understanding cultural evolution.
2. EVOLUTIONARY ACTIVITY Evolutionary activity statistics are quite general and apply to data generated by both artificial and natural systems, and they apply at different levels of analysis (Bedau and Packard 1992; Bedau 1995; Bedau 1996; Bedau and Brown 1997; Bedau, Joshi, and Lillie 1999; Bedau, Snyder, Brown, and Packard 1997; Bedau, Snyder, and Packard 1998; Rechtsteiner and Bedau 1999a,b). Comparing data from a variety of different systems suggests that these statistics can be used to partition evolutionary dynamics into four qualitatively different classes. Class 1 consists of systems in which evolution creates no adaptations at all (e.g., all neutral models, systems in which the mutation rate is too high, and systems in which the selection pressure is too low, etc.). The signature for this class is zero excess intensity and extent of activity. Systems in which evolution has created adaptations but in which no new adaptations are being created fall into class 2 (e.g., stable ecosystems), with the signature of zero excess intensity and unbounded excess extent. Class 3 consists of systems that continually create new adaptations but are bounded in the amount of adaptive structure they contain (e.g., if new adaptations always supplant old adaptations). It’s signature is positive excess intensity and bounded excess extent. If new adaptations are continually created and the total amount of adaptive structure continues to grow, then the system falls into class 4, which has the signature of positive excess intensity and unbounded excess extent. The biosphere as reflected in the fossil record exhibits class 4 dynamics. (For more details about this classification, see Bedau, Synder, and Packard 1998, and Skusa and Bedau 2002.) Class 4 is an especially explosive kind of evolutionary creativity. It is intriguing in part because no known existing
artificial evolving system generates the same kind of behavior (Bedau, Snyder, Brown, and Packard 1997; Bedau, Snyder, and Packard 1998). Although we do not know the mechanism behind class 4 behavior, it seems to involve the course of evolution continually creating new kinds of environments that open the door to qualitatively new kinds of adaptations. There is some reason to think that a similar hyper-creative process might be at work in the evolution of technology. To start to assess this conjecture we apply evolutionary activity statistics to patent records in order to see the evolution of technology. Activity graphs are an empirical picture of the adaptive dynamics in patented inventions. Such pictures allow us to compare the dynamics of patented technology with those exhibited in biological evolution.
3. HOW TO MEASURE EVOLUTIONARY ACTIVITY IN PATENT DATA Patents offer some important advantages for those looking for the evolution of technology in empirical data. The evolution of technology is a kind of cultural evolution, and it is often difficult to operationalize the units of cultural evolution. It is difficult to distinguish new innovations from copies of old innovations when the items are ideas or other mental aspects of culture. Another difficulty is ascertaining precise genealogical relationships. One can finesse these difficulties by studying the evolution of technology as reflected in patent records. Although the evolution of inventions involves the diffusion and selection of ideas, one can identify individual inventions with individual patents. To be patentable an invention must meet three criteria: novelty, usefulness, and non-obviousness. So patented inventions are certified to be new and functional. A patent's novelty is documented by citing the previous patents (and sometimes published papers) that involve related ideas; these are called the patent's “prior art.” The citations should identify all the important prior art from which the invention is derived, and in the aggregate they allow a patent’s entire genealogy to be inferred. The analogies and disanalogies between biological and cultural evolution are a matter of some controversy (Aunger 2000, Hull 1988, 2001, Blackmoor 1999) but it is relatively straightforward to extract evolutionary activity data from patent records. The units of evolution with which we are concerned (at least in the first instance) are individual patents; these are analogous to genes (or, as memeticists might suggest, “memes”). A gene could vanish forever from an evolutionary system. By contrast, a patented invention never goes fully extinct because the invention exists forever in the patent records. We consider that a patent “reproduces” when it leads to the production of other patents; that is, in contrast with most biological evolution, patent reproduction necessarily involves evolutionary innovation.
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Especially successful or valuable patents tend to be those that are especially heavily cited. A large body of work in scientometrics has repeatedly confirmed that number of citations is a good reflection of the technological significance and economic value of a patented invention (Albert et al. 1991; Narin 1994; Pavitt 1985; Perko and Narin 1997; Albert 1998). Once a patent has received more than ten citations, the economic value reflected by each additional citation has been estimated to be more than one million US dollars (Harhoff et al. 1999). For these reasons our bookkeeping of an individual patent's evolutionary activity is based on summing the citations the patent has received. From this perspective, the adaptive success of a patented innovation is measured by the extent to which it spawns subsequent patented innovations. More specifically, we increment a patent's activity at a given time by the number of citations it receives from patents issued at that time. The fact that a patent has received a few citations does not prove that the invention significantly shapes the evolution of subsequent inventions. A patent might be cited by one or two subsequent patents even if patents to cite were chosen entirely at random. As with evolutionary activity measurements in other contexts, we can evaluate a patent's adaptive significance by comparing its activity with the activity observed in a neutral model of patent evolution. Our patent neutral model mirrors a few key aspects of the real patent data. In both the same number of patents are issued each week, and they exhibit the same distribution into the various patent classes. Patent citations refer to the same number of pre-9/96 and post-9/96 patents, and the references to post-9/96 patents fall into the various patent classes according to the same distribution. The key distinguishing feature of the neutral model is that the patents to be cited are always chosen randomly.
4. PILOT PROJECT RESULTS Skusa and I studied the evolution of technology as reflected in the 868,535 utility patents granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office between 9/96 and 7/02. We showed a dramatic difference between the activity accrued by the most heavily cited real patents and the most heavily cited shadow patents. Overall, the citation levels of shadow patents are very much lower than the citation levels of patents with excess activity. This shows that high citation levels are not due to chance but reflect an invention’s value. That is, an invention’s salient “reproductive” activity is caused by selection for the invention because of its technological value. We also saw that the activity of one patent stood far above the rest, accruing almost twice as many citations as any other patent. This patent covers the technology that allows web browsers to display information such as advertisements while a page is being loaded a link is clicked. The second most heavily cited patent covers the technology that allows cell phones to receive email and faxes, and the third most heavily cited patent allows remote control of the receipt and delivery of wireless and wireline voice and text messages. All of the ten most heavily cited patents fall into the information technology sector, and seven of them involve the Internet. More detailed information can be extracted from the evolutionary activity data (see Skusa and Bedau 2002). The point here is simply that evolutionary activity statistics make it feasible to visualize and quantitatively assess the adaptive evolutionary dynamics exhibited in cultural evolution. We have applied the method to technological evolution as reflected in patent record data, but it can be applied to a variety of other
cultural systems. Our pilot project underscores the vast importance of information technology, and especially the Internet, over the past five years. This is not news, of course; it just corroborates what we already knew. But it does confirm the aptness and probity of evolutionary activity analysis of cultural evolution. Furthermore, it opens the door to quantitative comparison of cultural and biological evolution. And this provides a constructive empirical route for investigating whether the hyper-creativity exhibited by biological evolution also characterizes cultural change.
5. CONCLUSION David Hull probably speaks for most philosophers and scientists when he says he wants to “avoid the use of such problematic notions as ‘benefit’” in his treatment of natural selection because “their elimination from explanations of biological adaptations was one of Darwin’s major achievements” (Hull 2001, p. 57). I want to counter this attitude with a gestalt switch. In my view, Darwin does not remove value notions like benefit from our understanding of biological adaptation; he simply spells out the objective signs that reflect when those benefits play a certain kind of explanatory role. The gestalt switch I recommend is to treat Darwin’s achievement not as the elimination of value in biology but as its operationalization.
6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to Andy Buchanan, Andre Skusa, Bobby Gadda, and Norman Packard for collaboration on the evolution of technology.
7. REFERENCES [1] Albert, M. B. 1998. The new innovators: Global patenting
trends in five sectors. Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce.
[2] Albert, M., Avery, D., Narin, F., and McAllister, P. 1991. Direct validation of citation counts as indicators of industrially important patents. Research Policy 20: 251-259.
[3] Aunger, R., ed. 2000. Darwinizing culture: The status of memetics as a science. New York: Oxford University Press.
[4] Bedau, M. A. 1995. Three Illustrations of Artificial Life's Working Hypothesis. In Banzhaf, W., and Eeckman, F. (eds.) 1995. Evolution and Biocomputation—Computational Models of Evolution (Berlin: Springer), 53-68. Available for download at http://www.reed.edu/~mab/biocomputation.pdf
[5] Bedau, M. A. 1996. The Nature of Life. In Boden, M., ed., The Philosophy of Artificial Life (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 332-357. Available for download at http://www.reed.edu/~mab/life.OXFORD.html
[6] Bedau, M. A., and Brown, C. T. 1997. Visualizing Evolutionary Activity of Genotypes. Artificial Life 5: 17-35. Available for download at http://www.reed.edu/~mab/vis_gtypes_alifejournal.pdf
[7] Bedau, M. A., S. Joshi, and B. Lillie. 1999. Visualizing Waves of Evolutionary Activity of Alleles. In A. Wu, ed., Proceedings of 1999 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Workshop Program (Orlando: GECCO Proceedings), pp. 96-98. Available for download at http://www.reed.edu/~mab/vis_gecco99.pdf
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[8] Bedau, M. A., and Packard, N. 1992. Measurement of Evolutionary Activity, Teleology, and Life. In Langton, C., Taylor, C., Farmer, J. D., and Rasmussen, S., eds., Artificial Life II (Redwood City, CA: Addison Wesley), pp. 431-461. Available for download at http://www.reed.edu/~mab/alife2.pdf
[9] Bedau, M. A., Snyder, E., Brown, C. T., and Packard, N. H. 1997. A Comparison of Evolutionary Activity in Artificial Systems and in the Biosphere. In Husbands, P. and Harvey, I., eds., Proceedings of the Fourth European Conference on Artificial Life, ECAL97 (Cambridge: MIT Press), pp. 125-134. Available for download at http://www.reed.edu/~mab/ecal97.pdf
[10] Bedau, M. A., E. Snyder, N. H. Packard. 1998. A Classification of Long-Term Evolutionary Dynamics. In Adami, C., Belew, R., Kitano, H., and Taylor, C., eds., Artificial Life VI (Cambridge: MIT Press), pp. 228-237. Available for download at http://www.reed.edu/~mab/alife6.pdf
[11] Blackmore, S. 1999. The meme machine. New York: Oxford University Press.
[12] Harhoff, D., Narin, F., Scherer, F. M., and Vopel, K. 1999. Citation frequency and the value of patented innovation. Research Policy 81: 511--515.
[13] Hull, D. L. 1988. Science as a process: An evolutionary account of the social and conceptual development of science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
[14] Hull, D. L. 2001. Science and selection: Essays on biological evolution and the philosophy of science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[15] Narin, F. 1994. Patent bibliometrics. Scientometrics 30: 147-155.
[16] Pavitt, K. 1985. Patent statistics as indicators of innovative activities: Possibilities and problems. Scientometrics 7: 77--99.
[17] Perko, J. S., and Narin, F. 1997. The transfer of public science to patented technology: A case study in agricultural science. Journal of Technology Transfer 22: 65--72.
[18] Rechtsteiner, A.and M. A. Bedau, 1999a, A Generic Model for Quantitative Comparison of Genotypic Evolutionary Activity. In D. Floreano, J.-D. Nicoud, F. Mondada, eds., Advances in Artificial Life (Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag), pp. 109-118. Available for download at http://www.reed.edu/~mab/ecal99.pdf
[19] Rechtsteiner, A. and M. A. Bedau, 1999b. A Generic Model for Measuring Excess Evolutionary Activity. In Banzhaf, W., Daida, J., Eiben, A. E., Garzon, M. H., Honavar, V., Jakiela, M., & Smith, R. E. (eds.), GECCO-99: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, Vol. 2 (San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann), pp. 1366-1373. Available for download at http://www.reed.edu/~mab/gecco99.pdf
[20] Skusa, A. and M. A. Bedau. 2002. Towards a comparison of evolutionary creativity in biological and cultural evolution. In Artificial Life VIII, R. Standish, M. A. Bedau, and H. Abbass, eds., pp. 233-242. Cambridge: MIT Press.
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Practical Civil Engineering and Philosophy Dennis Gedge
Consulting Civil Engineer Whitestones Ivybridge Devon PL21 0WF UK
+44 01752 698298
ABSTRACT The author comments on some philosophical observations arising from working as a Civil Engineer implementing projects, as opposed to examining those questions which concern Civil Engineers who contemplate about the worth of their projects to start with. .
1. INTRODUCTION One of the interesting paintings at the Headquarters Building of the U K Civil Engineers in London shows a scene from one of the great railway building enterprises of the past. There is a massive railway viaduct in the background, there are stacks of partly-cut stone, scaffolding, excavations and various materials all being conveyed by horse drawn vehicles. In the foreground there is a table with rolls of plans upon it, and gathered around this table is an intense group of people who are all pondering the situation. Doubtless they all have their own points of view. Standing slightly to one side is someone politely clutching his cap, someone whose identity can not be mistaken. He is the Contractor. And the question forming itself in the mind of the chairman of the group around the table is no doubt…” Do you think that you can do it?”
2. CONSTRUCTION ON SITE I mention this scene because, although the techniques might seem antiquated, we can clearly see all those characters are still with us today, the men of vision who want the project to be built, those who have dealt with the politics and finances, and then the Civil Engineers on the site who actually have to get the job done, for an agreed price. There is a pre-requisite need for philosophy to meet engineering, especially in Civil Engineering, because the immaterial matters of theory, have to be implemented in practice, Putting it another way, design and construction have to be brought together in order to achieve any physical benefit at the end of it, in exactly the same way that sterile medical science requires ‘bedside manner’ if patients are going to benefit.
No Civil job that has been, (or indeed will be) built, has ever been done exactly as the original drawings, design and specification required. Things can never work out exactly as planned. Underground strata can vary unexpectedly for example, or problems can arise over land ownerships or the presence of uncharted service mains. The specified materials for construction might suddenly become non-available due to strikes or even war. Putting it bluntly, engineers just have to make the best of it as the job goes along. Civil Engineering is a curious mix of doing seemingly very basic things, (like providing a crossing from one bank of the river to the other, such that travellers do not get wet), but by doing these things by using the latest scientific theories which attempt to explain the behaviour of materials in real conditions. In some ways engineering science which is a branch of physics, will remain empirical, since any scientific law can only remain true for a
limited time, if scientific discoveries are to progress. As with the concept of perfect justice, there can never be exact solutions to problems in engineering either. We have become familiar with the concept of factor of safety but it is impossible to cater for all the loading conditions or other circumstances which could arise during the working life of a project, because no one has yet been able to predict the future.
Many of the problems which do arise for the Civil Engineer who is responsible for actually constructing works, boil down to arguments over positions of power or superiority of those involved. Who owns the land is one such question, the other type of question is one of money, is the Contractor due to be paid any extra for what appears to be a more complicated job than the one tendered for .It is not uncommon for technical problems, which might hold a job up, to be quite easily solved in theory, but getting people to agree to the solutions is a very different matter. Is it better to arrive at a job that works imperfectly, far below specification, or should one hold out for a perfect job, no matter how much it costs. On the other hand should the job be toned down to avoid destroying vulnerable habitats, or simply displacing people from their homes. Practical Civil Engineers on construction sites very often have the opportunity to influence matters like this, but should they as members of a profession involve themselves in politics, or is the role of the professions just to carry out the tasks decided by politicians?
Any Civil Engineer today would most probably say that they worked in “the Industry” which implies that they operated within asset based businesses as opposed to risk based ones. There is no doubt though that professional Engineers stock in trade is ideas, not commodities. It is the communication of those ideas, which is the vital part, it is no good having the right answer to a problem if you can not tell anyone about it, and how to solve it when it comes to actually building it.
I drew a parallel earlier with the medical profession, and in engineering there is another parallel. This is because when it comes to a medical prognosis it is often very more effective if it is delivered in a poetic way, this is not simply to spare the patients feelings, but because poetry imparts more meanings to words than they are normally expected to have. A poetic prognosis can say far more than a bald statement. In the case of engineering construction projects they sometimes reach crises where decisions have to be made in the best interests of all concerned, for example, does the plant have to be shut down, because the construction work has gone awry, meaning it will not work properly. Or perhaps what has been built already should be knocked down, because it might not be strong enough to carry the likely loading, when it finally enters service.
A Civil Engineer is usually the one who has to summarise all the points of view and responsibilities, and if this too is done in a poetic, even modest way it is likely to be far more effective than listing out a set of bullet points like a sales presentation. It
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is at times like this that engineering and philosophy indeed do meet in a practical way.
3. CONCLUSION Engineering and practical philosophy are definitely intertwined because unless theoretical knowledge is put into the physical world by way of interpretation it can serve no engineering use. This brings us to another age-old question, namely the definition of an engineer. Who is the more competent engineer,
a highly qualified mathematical engineering scientist, who proposes something almost impossible to construct, or a skilled bricklayer on site, who solves the problem in a way that obviates the need for complex scientific analysis?
There can be no philosophy without words. Perhaps in the case of the practical philosophy which is needed to get through engineering projects, there might be no philosophy without morality either. To construct anything without morality reduces it to the banality of evil, far removed from engineering.
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The Focal Engineering Experience Gene Moriarty
Department of Electrical Engineering San Jose State University
San Jose, CA 95192 408.924.3882
Keywords Focal Engineering, modern engineering, premodern engineering, experience, Erlebnis, Erfahrung, Borgmann, Agamben, ethical assessments, hyper-modernism, hermeneutics.
1. INTRODUCTION Looked at diachronically, we see a premodern, modern, and now a postmodern engineering project. The postmodern project is taking shape all around us, even at this gathering, even as we speak. What would we like to see it become? I suggest that postmodern engineering move in the direction of what I am calling focal engineering. The notion of focal comes from the advocacy of Albert Borgmann for focal things and practices to engage our lives, as a counter to the disengaging tendencies of modern technology. I propose to look at what focal engineering might be, what the experience of it might entail, and how it could be assessed.
2. EXPERIENCE To experience something is to perceive it, to take it in, to learn from it. The German language has two words, Erlebnis and Erfahrung, that both translate into the English word experience. These words and the ideas behind them have had a long and distinguished history within the history of philosophy, as shown in the captivating treatise Songs of Experience [1] by Martin Jay. In recent times Buber, Husserl, Dilthey, Heidegger, Agamben, Bergson, Adorno, Benjamin, Gadamer, and others have expounded upon the Erlebnis/Erfahrung distinction, offering a wide array of interpretations.
2.1 Erfahrung I take Erfahrung to be the kind of experience that is reflective, mediated, second-hand, and generalized out of the original context of the experience. It is socially undergone, concerned with causes and effects, and has lasting consequences. It is an on-going process extended over time and space. There is in it a sense of being on a journey or a trip. Knowledge gained from Erfahrung is sedimented into the structures of our being. It is our ordinary everyday experience.
2.2 Erlebnis I take Erlebnis to be the kind of experience that deals directly in a first-hand encounter with the particular in its particularity. It suggests a prereflective immediacy of the moment of experience, intuitive holism, and intensity of feeling. It relates the transience of undistinguished life to the achievement of permanence in certain experiences. [2] As Gadamer puts it: “Something becomes an ‘experience’ not only insofar as it is experienced, but insofar as its being experienced makes a special impression that gives it lasting importance. [3] Erlebnis is the Augenblick experience, or the “a-ha” experience.
3. GIORGIO AGAMBEN Giorgio Agamben, in his essay The Destruction of Experience, maintains that experience is no longer accessible to us. A look at daily life in any city should be enough to convince anyone of that. “For modern man’s average day contains virtually nothing that can be translated into experience.” [4] Agamben is really talking about the destruction of direct first-hand experience (Erlebnis). We prefer our experiences second-hand (Erfahrung). “Standing face to face with one of the great wonders of the world…the overwhelming majority of people have no wish to experience it, preferring instead that the camera should.” My understanding of Agamben is that we no longer “have” first-hand experiences, although we do “undergo” second-hand experience. This means more and more of our experience is mediated, and this mediation is enabled by the products of the engineering enterprise. Now, mediation is not necessarily a bad thing, and I think Agamben would agree with that assessment. Second-hand experience can actually offer us a wider palette of possibilities, including consolidations and summaries from instruments as well as from first-hand experiencers. Especially important is the fact that multiple voices participate in the social aspect of the Erfahrung.
4. ALBERT BORGMANN Borgmann, however, sees a danger, not so much with the technology and engineered products with which we take up with reality, but rather in the exclusiveness of that way of being. These products, he maintains, tend to disengage us. A life saturated with such products becomes a life of total disengagement. [5] As Guy Debord put it: we run the risk of becoming mere spectators of the spectacle of life. [6] To promote engagement, Borgmann suggested that we develop focal things and practices. Focal engineering takes off from here.
5. FOCAL ENGINEERING Engineering engineers products that disburden us. Certainly that is a good thing. But in tending also toward disengagement, involvement with these products is likely to suppress the visceral nature of concrete felt experience. This, however, need not be the case. In order to retrieve a sense of the engagement, enlivenment, and resonance possible in an authentic lifeworld experience (Erlebnis), I am proposing a different kind of engineering, a focal engineering, which takes up with what Borgmann calls postmodern realism, as opposed to a continuation of the status quo of engineering practice which Borgmann refers to as a kind of hyper-modernism. That hyper-modernism intensifies the Erfahrung by sedimenting experience and knowledge into the structures of our being but at an ever accelerating rate. Focal engineering, on the other hand slows things down a bit. It aims at The Good, not just at the
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possibilities of doing no harm. The notion of The Good is of course a delicate matter. It requires at the very least a conversation that is honest, open, and non-coercive. Focal engineering is engineering that asks “why” questions and is predicated on context. It seeks to bring into the world products that are harmonious not only with the end-user (as in the practices of the Human-Computer-Interface movement), but also with the world, the context within which these products will be employed. Focal engineering subsumes modern and premodern engineering. For the most part, premodern engineering asks “how” question, modern engineering “how” and “what” questions, and focal engineering “how,” “what,” and “why” questions. Finally and of particular importance, modern engineering has aims of functionality, efficiency, and productivity. So does focal engineering. But focal engineering also has the aim of harmonious accord of end-user, product, and lifeworld. The harmonies exhibited within this configuration have an epiphanic effect when true Erlebnis comes to pass.
6. HERMENEUTICS Hermeneutics can refer to a backwards and forwards relatedness involving experience and interpretation, then further experience, then deeper interpretation, and so on. Just looking at the case of the focal engineering venture, we can consider a hermeneutic circle between the Erlebnis experience of the ethical assessment of the focal engineering project (involving vocables like engagement, enlivenment, resonance, epiphany, etc.) and the Erfahrung experience which entails pragmatics like seeing if a focally engineered product for instance is in fact functional, efficient, etc. If we loosely link Erfahrung with conceptual being and Erlebnis with affective being, then we can view the hermeneutic circle of interpretation as a full experience covering much of what is typically at issue in most engineering assessments. We could start with the affective
Erlebnis experience, then turn to an immediate interpretation of that experience, then undergo a cognitive experience of that interpretation (Erfahrung), then move to a sedimentation of that experience. It would be like adding layers on the onion. Finally, return to the Erlebnis, back to square one, and begin again. This time, however, everything should be at a slightly higher level.
7. REFERENCES [1] Jay, Martin. 2004. Songs of Experience: Modern
American and European Variations on a Universal Theme. University of California Press.
[2] Arthos, John. 2000. “To Be Alive When Something Happens”: Retrieving Dilthey’s Erlebnis. Janus Head.
[3] Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1993. Truth and Method. 2nd rev. ed. Trans Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. Continuum, 61.
[4] Agamben, Giorgio. 2007. Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience. Verso.
[5] Borgmann, Albert. 1984. Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life. University of Chicago Press.
[6] Debord, Guy. La société du spectacle. 1967. numerous editions; in English: The Society of the Spectacle, Zone Books 1995.
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The Ethics of Designing Autonomous Technologies
Peter M. Asaro Rutgers University & Umeå University
8 Bishop Place New Brunswick, NJ 08901
217 352-7737 [email protected]
ABSTRACT Rapid improvements in computer power and steadily dropping prices for powerful chips, batteries and motors have begun to enable a new generation of autonomous “smart” objects that promise to permeate our lives. More and more consumer goods are appearing with sensors, actuators, and communications protocols built into them, while technology visionaries like Bill Gates and Rodney Brooks are predicting an age of personal robotics, not unlike the age of personal computers. While there are many useful applications, there is also a great potential for these kinds of devices to be misused, malfunction, or have otherwise unintended consequences. As an engineer of such devices, how is one supposed to address these issues ethically? Given the vast range of possible operating environments and creative uses of autonomous and semi-autonomous devices, how can an engineer be expected to anticipate them all? Moreover, as devices such as autonomous robots begin to learn and act in complex social environments, what sort of responsibility does the engineer have in the design of such a device? In this presentation I will seek to address these questions. I will consider the traditional sorts of approaches taken toward engineering ethics, including utilitarian risk analysis and deontological rule-following. While backed up by vast literatures, both approaches seem ill-equipped to deal with the unique challenges facing autonomous technologies. Engineering ethics has primarily focused on the responsibility of individual engineers in the process of design. While all sorts of technologies can have unintended impacts on society and the environment, autonomous technologies can have their own intentions, in some sense. Thus, the ethics of designing such systems should concern itself not merely with the ethics of the engineer making design choices, but with the ethics of the autonomous systems themselves. One approach to this is a reflexive one. That is, we can look at the problem of training engineers to be ethical as being similar to that of designing autonomous technologies to be ethical. There are, of course significant differences, but it is useful to think about the similarities. Namely, this comparison can help us to improve the training of human engineers, at the same time as improving the design of autonomous technologies. The key to this is to begin thinking about how to make complex and open systems that are benign or benevolent towards other agents and their environment. One approach to this would be pedagogical–the best way to teach this to engineering students is a hands-onproject-oriented approach. Similarly, the best way to design ethical autonomous systems is not from first principles or exhaustive analysis, but by hands-on trial-and-error approaches.
The most common approach to teaching engineering ethics is to focus on a set of case studies, which illuminate the various ways in which engineers can face decisions where their ethical principles are in conflict. Because of the complexity of real-life decisions, no hard-and-fast rules can be developed to resolve such issues, thus it is hoped that engineering students can learn from case studies whatever it is they need to help them make real-life decisions. The fundamental assumption of this kind of ethical training is a faith in the power of individual choice. That is, it is the individual engineer who makes the design decision who is responsible for it. This article of faith misses several important aspects of real-world ethical choices. These are, primarily, 1) that the situations and contexts in which individual decisions are made are only rarely structured by the individual making the choice, and 2) that social organizations and technological systems frequently engage in complicated translations of responsibility and control, with the result being that any given socio-technical system is a complex of distributed agency and responsibility, in which it can be difficult to identify any particular individual as uniquely responsible for the behavior of the system in some situation. Yet there remains a tenacious faith in the sole and unique responsibility of individuals in such systems, which I shall call “methodological individualism” due to its similarity to various approaches to psychology and the human sciences (Wilson, 2004). I want to argue that this insistence on individual responsibility in engineering ethics has prevented us from developing a an ethical approach to technological development which does justice to the distributed responsibility of socio-technical systems. As a result of this, we are confronted by social formations which arise to obscure individual responsibility, which are often unable to reform themselves, and which become preoccupied with scapegoating individuals to absolve institutions. Thus, even as we try to design mechanisms for the oversight of complex technological systems, we are hindered by a systematic ignorance of the distributed nature of responsibility. What would a post-individualist engineering ethics look like? First, the primary unit of analysis would become the “community of practice” which produces a technology. Rather than trying to identify which individuals are responsible for which decisions, by holding all members of a team or community responsible, then they all have an interest in insuring that their product is safe. It also should be possible to hold responsible those who create the conditions and context in which such a community operates. Thus a corporation could and should be held responsible when they put harmful pressures on teams, thus encouraging them to cut corners at the expense of safety.
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Autonomous technologies epitomize the concept of distributed responsibility in socio-technical systems. While it will take some time to completely develop a community-based engineering ethics, we can sketch out how it might be applied to the challenges of designing autonomous technologies. Primarily, we must look to not only the communities that produce such technologies, but also to those which use them. More specifically, we must find ways of connecting these communities of use to the communities of design within a critically reflective development cycle (Asaro 2000). Keywords Engineering ethics, autonomous technologies, communities of practice, participatory design, individual responsibility.
7. REFERENCES [1] Asaro, Peter (2000). “Transforming Society by
Transforming Technology: The Science and Politics of Participatory Design,” Accounting, Management and Information Technologies, 10(4), pp. 257-290.
[2] Wilson, Robert A. (2004). Boundaries of the Mind: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
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Ethics in Innovation: Cooperation and Tension
M.K. de Kreuk TU Delft
School of Applied Science Department Biotechnology
+31 15 2781551
I.R. van de Poel TU Delft
School of Technology, Policy and Management Department Philosophy
+31 15 2784716
S.D. Zwart TU Delft
School of Technology, Policy and Management Department Philosophy
+31 15 2785906
M.C.M. van Loosdrecht
TU Delft School of Applied Science Department Biotechnology
+31 15 2781618
M.C.M.vanloosdrecht @tudelft.nl
ABSTRACT An ethical parallel study has been performed during the development of a new technology for wastewater treatment. Different aspects of the network involved in this innovation were studied, these include the inventory of the network, the risks in implementation of the technology foreseen by the different actors in the network and the responsibility of ethical issues, failure and success of the technology. However, participating in a parallel study made the ethicists part of the network and influenced the discussions in the network and the direction of the research. In this contribution the researchers reflect on the influence of the ethical parallel study on the innovation itself, on public perception and on future research and development.
Keywords Innovation, ethics, wastewater treatment, risk, responsibility, networks, ethical parallel research, pathogens
1. THE TECHNICAL INNOVATION In conventional wastewater treatment plants, large footprints are needed for the treatment of sewage, which is due to the low average biomass concentration in the reactors and the large tanks needed for the separation of biomass and effluent. Since treatment plants are generally located in dense populated areas, compact systems are desired. In order to build smaller reactors, biomass should grow in dense structures to increase the separation efficieny of biomass and treated water and to increase the biomass concentration. In the nineties, it was found that the use of sequencing batch reactors instead of the conventional continuous systems, could lead to granule formation under aerobic circumstances [1,3]. Besides excellent settling characteristics, aerobic granules have a unique structure resulting in the possibility to perform all process-steps in a single reactor. This reduces the required land area with 80% and the energy need with more than 30% [2]. The technology (brandname Nereda®) is currently applied in industry and sewage treatment plants are designed and will be built in the near future. Full-scale design and pilot plant research is performed by DHV in close cooperation with the TU Delft.
2. ETHICAL ISSUES The ethical issues in the development of the new technology were discerned using a newly developed network approach to ethics and innovation [4]. This approach was developed in order to take as serious as possible the moral concerns and considerations of the actors in the network. In this case, it was decided to focus on the ethical issues related to risks and responsibilities. A session in the Group Decision Room was organized with the main actors (researchers, water boards, and engineering firm DHV) from the Nereda® network. This session resulted in an inventory of potential risks, actors’ estimates of the seriousness of these risks, and potential gaps in the distribution of responsibilities. It became also apparent that actors attached different meanings to some of the crucial terms. These results were later verified by interviews.
3. RISKS AND RESPONSIBILITIES Despite the fact that minimizing the risk of outbreaks of epidemics, as the cholera epidemic in the 19th century, is the major reason for treatment of sewage, systematic risk analysis is not a widely applied part of the development of innovations in wastewater treatment technology. Risks are often supposed to be similar to the ones of the known technologies and engineers use intuitive analogies to assume the new risks belonging to the innovation. To illustrate: around 1% of the journal papers published in the last 50 years, which contained the concepts ‘wastewater’ or ‘sewage’, also contained the concept ‘pathogen’ (figure 1, source: SciFinder Scholar). This is in line with the felt need for fast implementation of innovations in wastewater treatment, because of strong worldwide competition. (Economically based) choices need to be made between fast implementation and a thorough research track. During the development of Nereda®, the responsibility for certain aspects (e.g. secondary emissions, pathogen removal) was not addressed clearly and seemed to ‘evaporate’ within the network. The focus was on the technology itself and effluent-demands outlined in European legislation, rather than on aspects that are more difficult to study or quantify (as measuring the impact/risk of effluent). Because of the (economical) benefits for society (less space, less energy, cheaper), focus was on rapid implementation and optimizing accompanying primary effluent demands and granule stability/formation.
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4Diibdet(edNpiatuOaGeetdriiss
imply the actual existence of a real risk. For such reasons, the ethical researchers should be careful in choosing their words. Nevertheless, they should be able to work independently and not refrain from voicing serious ethical concerns. In sum, by becoming an actor in the network, the ethicists acquire new responsibilities towards the other actors and for the development of the new technology.
5. CONCLUSIONS Ethical research and network analysis performed in parallel to the development of a new technology can be very helpful in mapping responsibilities and risk perception, and in uncovering possible ethical problems. This induces better communication in the network and can lead to new research and improved technologies. As the ethicists become automatically an actor in the network during their parallel research, they also acquire new responsibilities towards the other actors.
Figure 1 Number of published journal papers in the past50 years containing the concept sewage or wastewatertogether with the concept in the diagram
. COOPERATION AND TENSION uring the projects, results from the ethical parallel study were
nformally and formally communicated to the researchers. This mplied that the ethicists were not mere observers and annalists, ut became actors in the network. In the course of the project, ue to the ethical parallel research certain issues (e.g. secondary missions and pathogen removal), became more important than hey were before the interviews and group decision room GDR) meeting. The researchers also began to realize that they stimated the risk of casualties as much lower than the users id. Parallel to the existing track of fast implementation of the ereda® system, the shift in discussions led to new research rojects and proposals. Currently, the researchers are involved n a 6th framework project (INNOWATECH), studying the pplication of new technologies in industrial wastewater reatment, including the stability of aerobic granular sludge nder extreme conditions and the influence of xenobiotics. ther (PhD.) studies have been formulated to study scale-up
spects (as hydraulics, also one of the risks addressed in the DR), microbial ecology, as well as studying secondary
missions (as pathogen removal). Although the influence of thicists on the project was in general positive, it can also lead o tensions and moral dilemmas. One example of such a moral ilemma is the presentation of the results of the ethical parallel esearch to a broader audience. Focusing on the risks of a new nnovation can result in a negative public perception of the nnovation. Like many other sectors, the wastewater treatment ector is conventional and new technology is often met with kepticism. Moreover, a risk-inventory does not necessarily
6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The researchers thank NWO for financing the ethics parallel research project “Ethical aspects of risks of the transition from lab-scale model to full-size open plant in bioprocess technology” and the STW, Stowa, EU for financing the development of aerobic granular sludge. Also DHV and the water boards are acknowledged for their dedication in both projects.
7. REFERENCES [1] Beun, J. J., A. Hendriks, M. C. M. van Loosdrecht, M.
Morgenroth, P. A. Wilderer and J. J. Heijnen (1999). "Aerobic granulation in a sequencing batch reactor." Water Research 33(10): 2283-2290.
[2] De Bruin, L. M. M., M. K. De Kreuk, H. F. R. van der Roest, M. C. M. Van Loosdrecht and C. Uijterlinde (2004). "Aerobic granular sludge technology, alternative for activated sludge technology?" Water Science and Technology 49(11-12): 1-9.
[3] Morgenroth, E., T. Sherden, M. C. M. van Loosdrecht, J. J. Heijnen and P. A. Wilderer (1997). "Aerobic Granular Sludge in a Sequencing Batch Reactor." Water Research 31(12): 3191 - 3194.
[4] Zwart, S. D., I. Van de Poel, H. van Mil and M. Brumsen 2006. A network approach for distinguishing ethical issues in research and development. Science and Engineering Ethics 12 (4): 663-84.
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The Debate on Roboethics
G. Veruggio CNR-IEIIT & School of Robotics
Via De Marini, 6 16149 Genova, Italy +39 010 6475 616
Track: Ethics
F. Operto School of Robotics
P.O. Box 4124, P.za Monastero, 4 16149 Genova, Italy +39 348 0961616
ABSTRACT Robotics research and applications are increasingly raising ethical questions, related to emerging interactions between robots and humans, as well as to the closer interaction between robotics research and the biological and social sciences, for the common purpose of studying humans.
The application of ethics to machines, including robots and computer programs, has been so far mostly limited to the consideration that designers and operators should take full responsibility of machines’ actions. However, in the near future, the robotics community will develop machines whose behaviour will be an emergent and, to some extent, unforeseeable result of design and operation decisions made by humans and even by other machines. Moreover, the interaction and the physical integration of human beings and robotics systems is increasing exponentially.
Considering the high level of technological sophistication reached in recent years, the fact that technology in general, and robotics in particular, are moving closer and closer to human beings and human life, Roboethics, the ethical reflection that constantly evaluates and guides the scientific and engineering research, is of primary importance.
In 2005, EURON (European Robotics Research Network) funded the Research Atelier on Roboethics, with the aim of developing the first Roadmap of a Roboethics. The workshop on Roboethics took place in Genoa, Italy, 27th February - 3rd March 2006.
The ultimate purpose of the project was to provide a systematic assessment of the ethically sensitive issues involved in the Robotics R&D; to increase the understanding of the problems at stake, and to promote further study and trans-disciplinary research.
The Roboethics Roadmap – which was the result of the Atelier and of the following discussions and editing - outlines the multiple pathways for research and exploration in the field, and indicates how they might be developed. The Roadmap embodies the contributions of more than 50 scientists, scholars and technologists, from many fields of science and humanities. It is also a useful tool to design a robotics ethic respecting the different weltanschauungs and views of cultural, religious and ethical paradigms.
In the Roadmap, the authors have confined their definition of intelligence to an engineering point of view, that is, the
operational intelligence – although they are aware of the fact that roboticists’s terminology regarding robots’ functions is often taken from the language used for human beings.
One of the most ambitious aims of Robotics is to design an autonomous robot that could reach - and even surpass - human intelligence and performance in partially unknown, changing, and unpredictable environments. Artificial Intelligence will be able to lead robots to fulfil the missions required by the end-users. To achieve this goal, over the past decades scientists have been working on AI techniques in many fields.
One of the fundamental aspects of the robots is their capability to learn: to learn the characteristics of the surrounding environment, that is, a) the physical environment, but also b) the living beings who inhabit it. This means that robots working in a given environment have to recognize human beings and living creatures from inorganic objects.
In addition to performing a learning capability about the environment, robots have to understand their own behaviour, through a self reflective process. They have to learn from the experience, replicating somehow the natural processes of the evolution of intelligence in living beings (synthesis procedures, trying-and-error, learning by doing, and so on).
All these processes embodied in the robots produce an intelligent machine endowed with the capability to express a certain degree of autonomy. It follows that a robot can behave, in some cases, in a way which is unpredictable for their human designers. Basically, the increasing autonomy of the robots could give rise to unpredictable and non predictable behaviours. So, without necessarily imagining some Sci-Fi scenarios, in a few years we are going to be cohabiting with robots endowed with self knowledge and autonomy – in the engineering meaning of these words.
In terms of scope, the authors of the Roadmap have taken into consideration – from the point of view of the ethical issue connected to Robotics – a time range of a decade, in whose frame it could reasonably be located and inferred – on the basis of the current State-of-the-Art in Robotics – certain foreseeable developments in the field.
For this reason, the authors have considered premature – and have only hinted at – problems inherent in the possible emergence of human functions in the robot: like consciousness, freewill, self-consciousness, sense of dignity, emotions, and so on. Consequently, this is why the Roadmap does not examine problems – debated in literature – like the need not to consider
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robots as our slaves, or the need to guarantee them the same respect, rights and dignity we owe to human workers.
Likewise, and for the same reasons, the target of the Roboethics Roadmap is not the robot and its artificial ethics, but the human ethics of the robots’ designers, manufacturers and users. Although informed about the issues presented in some papers on the need and possibility to attribute moral values to robots’ decisions, and about the chance that in the future robots might be moral entities like – if not more than– human beings, the authors chose, in the first release of the Roboethics Roadmap, to examine the ethical issues of the human beings involved in the design, manufacturing, and use of the robots.
They have felt that problems like those connected to the application of robotics within the military and the possible use of military robots against some populations not provided with this sophisticated technology, as well as problems of terrorism in robotics and problems connected with bio-robotics, implantations and augmentation, were pressing and serious enough to deserve a focused and tailor-made investigation.
It is totally clear that without a deep rooting of Roboethics in society, the premises for the implementation of artificial ethics in the robots’ control systems will be missing.
The Roboethics Roadmap is an Open Work, a Directory of Topics & Issues, susceptible to further development and improvement which will be defined by events in our techno-scientific-ethical future. The authors are convinced that the different components of society working in Robotics, interested people and the stakeholders should intervene in the process of building a Roboethics Roadmap, in a grassroots science experimental case: the Parliaments, Academic Institutions, Research Labs, Public ethics committees, Professional Orders, Industry, Educational systems, the mass-media.
In the period of a year, the authors have carried out a tour d’horizon in the fields of Robotics: an overview of the state of the art in Robotics, and of the main ethical issues, driven by the most recent techno-scientific developments, which can only just be glimpsed.
A taxonomy of Robotics is not an easy task, precisely because the field is in full bloom. A classification of Robotics is a work in progress, done simultaneously with the development of the field itself.
Aware of the classifications produced by the main Robotics organizations, which differ from one another on the basis of the approach, the authors of the Roboethics Roadmap have preferred to unite the many Robotics fields from a typological standpoint, according to shared homogeneity of the problems of interface towards the society.
The Roadmap embodies an overview of the main ethically sensitive areas in Robotics. For every field, the authors have tried to analyze the current situation rather than the imaginable.
Thus, this first taxonomy gives priority to issues in applied ethics, rather than to theoretical generality, in the following areas:
• Humanoids (Artificial Mind, Artificial Body)
• Advanced production systems (Industrial robotics)
• Adaptive robot servants - intelligent homes (Indoor Service Robots, Ubiquitous Robotics)
• Network Robotics (Internet Robotics, Robot ecology)
• Outdoor Robotics (Land, Sea, Air, Space)
• Health Care and Life Quality (Surgical Robotics, Bio-Robotics, Assistive Technology)
• Military Robotics (Intelligent Weapons, Robot Soldiers, Superhumans)
• Edutainment (Educational Robots, Robot Toys, Entertainment, Robotic Art)
In this paper, the processes that sparked off the Roadmap are outlined, with an update on its latest developments, especially in the most robotically-developed Nations of Japan and South Korea.
In 2007, the Government of Japan issued a Draft Guidelines to Secure the Safe Performance of Next Generation Robots, where it calls for the formation of a special study group of industrialists, academics, ministry officials and, lawyers to draw up a set of firm proposals to govern the development of robots.
Furthermore, in the first month of the same year the Government of the Republic of Korea announced its desire to draw up a Roboethics Charter.
Lastly, the future plan of action is outlined to broadcast the Roboethics Roadmap content and to collect further contributions to the effort for developing these new applied ethics.
1. REFERENCES [1] Veruggio, G. “The EURON Roboethics Roadmap”,
Humanoids’06, December 6, 2006, Genoa, Italy
[2] Veruggio, G., Operto, F., “Roboethics: a Bottom-up Interdisciplinary Discourse in the Field of Applied Ethics in Robotics”, in IRIE, International Review of Information Ethics, Vol. 6 (12/2006)
[3] Veruggio, G. “Roboethics: an interdisciplinary approach to the social implications of Robotics” invited talk, E-CAP’07, June 21-23, 2007, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
[4] Veruggio, G., Operto, F, “The Roboethics Roadmap”, Plenary Session, CEPE 2007, Seventh International Computer Ethics Conference, July 2007, University of San Diego, USA
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What is the Use of Philosophy of Engineering? The case of the analysis of technical functions
Pieter E. Vermaas Philosophy Department
Delft University of Technology Jaffalaan 4, 2628 BX, Delft
The Netherlands
Keywords Philosophy and engineering, Technical Functions Dual Nature of Technical Artifacts,
1. CONTENT In this contribution I argue for the position that, from the side of philosophy, a greater interaction between philosophers and engineers can best be attained by creating first a separate and viable field of philosophy of engineering embedded primarily within the existing field of philosophy of technology. I make this position plausible on the basis of my experiences with disseminating the results of the philosophical analysis of technical functions as carried out in the Dual Nature of Technical Artifacts programme at Delft University of Technology.
The Dual Nature analysis – I will focus mainly on work with Wybo Houkes on technical functions – was presented to various audiences within philosophy of technology, within philosophy proper and within engineering. Presentations within philosophy of technology – at SPT conferences; at meetings and in publications organised by fellow philosophers of technology [1,2] – has turned out to be feasible and fruitful in terms of useful feedback. Yet, presentations outside of the field of philosophy of technology proved to be more difficult and to some extent distracting. Tailoring the analysis to these fields meant tuning the results of the analysis to the issues considered of interest by the audiences concerned, and implied becoming subjected to their disciplinary criteria of meaningfulness and relevance. For audiences in philosophy proper these consequences proved to be manageable, yet implied de-emphasising issues that are of interest to a philosophy of engineering itself. The Dual Nature analysis of technical functions is, for instance, suited for publishing on the philosophically more popular issue of biological functions [3]. But a characterisation of the various designing and using roles agents can play in relation to artefacts, relevant to understanding technical functions [4], is less interesting to audiences interested in biological functions. When disseminating work to engineering audiences, the mentioned consequences had more substantial impact, especially because of the engineering criteria that results should be fairly directly technologically useful. The Dual Nature analysis of technical functions is suited for publishing on design methodological issues. But, critical analyses of existing design methodologies [5,6] – a decent project within philosophy – were met with friendly advice to also come up with more constructive results; design methodologists criticise one another only if they can mend the problems identified, or so I was told. Yet, small steps towards constructive contributions [6,7] were sometimes met with judgments that they should be further developed to be useful, or that statistical data about this usefulness should be
gathered – a project which seems somewhat outside the reach of philosophy.
These experiences show in my opinion that some direct interaction between philosophy and engineering can be realised. But for improving this interaction, philosophers may need a niche in which they can develop their work, a niche in which philosophers are not immediately censored by the engineering criterion of technological usefulness. Doing research that is immediately relevant to both philosophy proper and engineering, may lead occasionally to a publication that can be regarded a jewel for philosophy of engineering; for creating a more viable community of researchers that offers academic room for brainstorming and developing research lines that are not instantly successful, this criterion of being immediately simultaneously relevant for two audiences should be eased. Philosophy of technology can provide for this niche in my mind: it is a field that has already some size, a size that needs strengthening, not fragmentation; and it is a field that, despite the differences with its more traditional content, is diverse enough to also harbour philosophy of engineering.
For illustrating my arguments and for presenting also some content, I will introduce in general terms the use-plan analysis of using and designing [1], the ICE-theory of technical functions [2,3], and the analysis [5,6] of John S. Gero’s FBS-model of engineering designing [8]. Furthermore I will discuss how engineers and design methodologists responded to these results when they were submitted for evaluation at engineering journals and conferences.
2. REFERENCES [1] Houkes, W., Vermaas, P.E., Dorst, K., and de Vries, M.J.
2002. Design and Use as Plans: An Action-Theoretical Account, Design Studies 23, 303-320.
[2] Houkes, W., and Vermaas, P.E. 2004. Actions versus Functions: A Plea For an Alternative Metaphysics of Artifacts, Monist 87, 52-71.
[3] Vermaas, P.E., and Houkes, W. 2003, Ascribing Functions to Technical Artefacts: A Challenge to Etiological Accounts of Functions, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 54, 261-289.
[4] Vermaas, P.E., and Houkes, W. 2006. Technical Functions: A Drawbridge between the Intentional and Structural Nature of Technical Artefacts, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 37, 5-18.
[5] Dorst, K., and Vermaas, P.E. 2005. John Gero’s Function-Behaviour-Structure Model of Designing: A Critical Analysis, Research in Engineering Design 16, 17-26.
[6] Vermaas, P.E., and Dorst, K. 2007. On the Conceptual Framework of John Gero’s FBS-model and the
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Prescriptive Aims of Design Methodology, Design Studies 28, 133-157.
[7] van Renssen, A., Vermaas, P.E., and Zwart, S.D. 2007. A Taxonomy of Functions in Gellish English, in 16th International Conference on Engineering Design, Design for Society: Knowledge, Innovation and Sustainability, 28-
30 August, 2007, Paris, France. Ecole Centrale Paris, abstract: pp. 549-550, full paper, 10 pp., on accompanying CD-ROM.
[8] Gero, J.S. 1990. Design prototypes: a knowledge representation schema for design, AI Magazine 11(4), 26-36
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Engineering science as a 'discipline of the particular': but how particular and how general?
Marc J. de Vries Eindhoven University of Technology
P.O. Box 513 5600 MB Eindhoven, Netherlands
31-40-2474629
EXTENDED ABSTRACT In a 1975 article on medical fallibility Samuel Gorovitz and Alasdair MacIntyre have argued for medical sciences to be called a 'discipline of the particular'. This makes them different from e.g. natural sciences, where the aim is to generalize as much as defendable (a 'discipline of universals'). According to the authors the lack of appreciation for 'disciplines of the particular' already started with Aristotle, who even denied the possibility of such disciplines. Later others have claimed the same qualification for other disciplines. James Ogilvy called aesthetics a 'science of the particular' and he saw a relationship with the fact that values are at the heart of the discipline of aesthetics (values can differ between different people, and for that reason it is difficult to make claims of a general nature, except perhaps the claim that there is no dispute about tastes). Ladislav Tondl made a connection between action-oriented types of knowledge and a lack of generalizability. Gregory Cooper described the problems for generalization for the discipline of ecology. In ecology in fact both previous aspects feature together: it is very much an action-oriented discipline in which (ecological) values play an important part. In the paper I intend to elaborate this for engineering. John Meurig Thomas (Royal Institution, London) already called industrial chemistry a 'science of particulars' (quoted from Philip Ball in a 2006 article in nature), and my (not so revolutionary) claim is that this can be extended to engineering in general. Joseph Pitt, too, pointed out the context-relatedness of knowledge in engineering. What has not been analyzed so far, though, is how particular the 'particular disciplines' are. Particular as they are, they will always have some level of generalization without which they would not be a scientific discipline. Police investigators use scientific methods to find out 'whodunnit', will not call themselves scientists and this is largely due to the fact that they have no intention to generalize the outcomes of their investigations (they leave that to other people, who call themselves criminologists). In the contribution to the upcoming Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Technology, Anthonie Meijers and I have mentioned this hydrid character of engineering sciences as typical for these sciences: they do want to generate knowledge that goes beyond one particular artifact or process, but not too much. This has to do with the fact that too much abstraction (often needed for generalization purposes) removes the knowledge too much from the application (the discipline is action-oriented), and the same holds for idealization. Hendricks, Jakobsen and Petersen have draw comparisons between the 'disciplinary matrices' in (natural) science and engineering, thereby also paying some attention to the issue of generalization, but they have not come up with concrete ideas of where generalization in engineers begins and ends.
One way of getting grip on this is too look at different types of generalization, idealization and abstraction. Daniela M. Bailer-Jones, for instance, differentiates between construct idealization and causal idealization. Cooper mentioned three types of generalization: theoretical principles, phenomenological patterns and causal generalizations. Tondl uses two types of generalizations: of a deterministic type and of a probabilistic type. Such taxonomies can be first entrances to analyze in what respects generalization in engineering sciences is different from that in natural sciences. Special attention will be given to the role of normativity in the engineering sciences as a characteristic that sets limits to generalizability. As in my previous writings on the nature of technological knowledge (De Vries 2003), I will use empirical material from the history of the Philips Research Laboratories as a resource for reflection (De Vries 2005). The setting of an industrial research laboratory is particularly interesting for reflection on the question of generalizability, as the researchers in such a laboratory usually (and certainly in the case of the Philips Research Laboratories) consider themselves to be scientists and want to contribute to the extension of the discipline, yet, the context of their research (an industrial company) constantly forces them to focus on applicability of their research outcomes. Thus the tension between generalizability and particularity in their discipline is strongly felt.
1. REFERENCES [1] Bailer-Jones, Daniela M. (2003), 'When scientific models
represent', International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 17, No 1, 11-20.
[2] Ball, Philip (2006), 'Chemistry: What chemists want to know', Nature, Vol. 442, 500-502.
[3] Cooper, Gregory (1998), 'Generalizations in Ecology: A Philosophical Taxonomy', Biology and Philosophy, Vol. 13, 555-586.
[4] Gorovitz, Samuel and MacIntyre, Alasdair (1975), 'Toward a theory of medical falibility', Hastings Center Report, Vol. 5, No. 6, 13-23.
[5] Hendricks, V.F., Jakobsen, A. and Pedersen, S.A. (2000), 'Identification of matrices in science and engineering', Journal for General Philosophy of Science, Vol. 31, 277-305.
[6] Ogilvy, James (1976), 'Art and Ethics', The Journal of Value Inquiry, Vol. 10, No. 1, 1-6.
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[7] Pitt, Joseph C.: 2001, ‘What Engineers Know’, Techné, Vol. 5, No. 3, 17-30.
[8] Shepard, Marc S. (1990), 'Idealization in Engineering Modeling and Design', Research in Engineering Design, Vol. 1, 229-238.
[9] Tondl, Ladislav (1998), 'What is the thematic structure of science?', Journal for General Philosophy of Science, Vol. 29, 245-264.
[10] Tondl, Ladislav (2007), 'Rational actions and the integration of knowledge', Journal for General Philosophy of Science, Vol. 38, 91-110.
[11] Vries, M.J. de (2003), ‘Toward an Empirically Informed Epistemology of Technology’, Techné, Vol. 6, No. 3, 1-21.
[12] Vries, M.J. de (2005), 80 Years of Research at the Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium 1914-1994. Amsterdam: Pallas Publications (Amsterdam University Press).
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Comparing Approaches to the Philosophy of Engineering — Including the Linguistic Philosophical
Approach Carl Mitcham
Colorado School of Mines Liberal Arts and International Studies
Golden, CO 8040 +1 303 273-3648
Robert Mackey Independent Scholar 6870 River Front Dr. Radford, VA 24141 +1 540 639-4347
ABSTRACT This paper compares six different possible approaches to the philosophy of engineering. One of these, the least developed, a linguistic approach to the philosophy of engineering, is then examined in slightly more detail. A conclusion argues for a pluralistic pursuit of the philosophy of engineering. Keywords Analysis, engineering, linguistic philosophy, phenomenology, philosophy, postmodernism, pragmatism, thomism.
1. INTRODUCTION Philosophy is practiced in different schools or traditions. Historically, it is common to distinguish between Platonism and Aristotelianism, Augustinianism and Thomism, rationalism and empiricism, and more. In the contemporary West the two most widely recognized distinctions are between the phenomenological school of continental Europe and the analytic school of Anglo-American provenance — although the geographical denominators are less significant than their differing methodological approaches. Thus in beginning to think about possibilities for the philosophy of engineering it is useful to consider how this new regionalization of philosophy might take shape within different approaches to philosophy. With slightly more specificity than the phenomenological/analytic distinction, it is possible to identify six currents in contemporary philosophy: (1) phenomenological philosophy, (2) postmodernist philosophy, (3) analytic philosophy, (4) linguistic philosophy, (5) pragmatist philosophy, and (6) thomist philosophy. It is important to note that these six currents are not mutually exclusive, that they often overlap. Nevertheless, for purposes of initial orientation concerning possibilities for the philosophy of engineering, it may be useful to consider the opportunities within these six. But beyond simply reviewing opportunities, it might be helpful to outline one approach in slightly more detail, by way of example. In the present instance, this exercise in further illustration will give slightly more attention to what the philosophy of engineering might look like from the perspective of linguistic philosophy..
2. SIX BASIC TYPES In short form it is neither possible nor appropriate to do more than simply provide a sentence or two indicating each approach, as follows. (1) A phenomenological approach to the philosophy of engineering would take engineering and/or some of its diverse
manifestations as phenomena calling for more careful description and attentive, critical reflection than they may have previously been accorded. One good illustration of the phenomenological approach can be found in the work of Don Ihde. (2) Postmodernism most commonly refers to the work of such figures as Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, or Jacques Derrida. In each case philosophical thinking typically undertakes to historicize or destabilize some subject matter, often by playful or ironic means. A postmodernist philosophy of engineering might, having noted some of the variegations of its so-called history and different contextualizations, question whether there even really is such a thing as engineering. Billy Vaugh Koen illustrates at least some of the playful aspects of this approach. (3) The analytic philosophy of engineering is perhaps most easily if inadequately illustrated by the work of someone such as Mario Bunge. From the 1960s to the present, and with repeated verve, Bunge has argued for conceptual distinctions between science and engineering, for the recognition of special forms of logic and knowledge in engineering, and for the engineering of ethics. Without necessarily buying all of Bunge’s positions, one could nevertheless argue that the philosophical analysis of engineering would attempt to rethink engineering in terms broader than those of engineering itself while applying engineering methods to the rethinking of many other aspects of human experience. (4) Linguistic philosophy takes the analysis of language as its starting point and, as in the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, suggests that clarification of language use can enable one to see through certain conundrums that may have accumulated in philosophical thought of both popular and professional sorts. What more precisely this might mean with regard to engineering remains to be explored. (5) Pragmatism in the last quarter of the 20th century became divided into epistemological and social philosophical schools. The profile of a pragmatist philosophy of engineering can be most clearly discerned in the social pragmatist philosophy of technology of such persons as John Dewey, Paul Durbin, and Larry Hickman. Durbin, in fact, has edited a book titled Critical Perspectives on Nonacademic Science and Engineering (1991) that brings together the work of some contributors to the present workshop in what he presents as a pragmatist effort to use philosophy to advance social reform. (6) Thomist philosophy of engineering would attempt to understand engineering in relation to the standard branches of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Again, cues for a thomist philosophy of engineering can be taken from thomist work in the philosophy of technology.
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3. TOWARD A LINGUISTIC PHILOSOPHY OF ENGINEERING Having itemized six basic types of or approaches to philosophy, it is appropriate to take up the challenge suggested by the above comment regarding the underdevelopment of a linguistic philosophy of engineering and attempt to map out some possibilities for this otherwise somewhat neglected approach. In the process it will be possible to indicate more fully the full scope of any philosophy of engineering. Important qualification: Linguistic philosophy is not the same as the philosophy of linguistics. As indicated, linguistic philosophy is an approach to or method for doing philosophy, not another regionalization of philosophy. Regionalized philosophies such as the philosophy of science, the philosophy of art, or the philosophy of religion typically include analyses of their subject matters from the perspectives of the main branches of philosophy — that is, epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, etc. In order to consider what a linguistic philosophy of engineering might look like, one approach would thus be to consider epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics as these have been manifested in linguistic philosophy, and then to consider in what ways the methods of linguistic epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics might carry over or be projected into engineering. Brief background: Philosophy is concerned with meaning: The meaning of life, the meaning of reality, the meaning of knowledge, the meaning of morality. For linguistic philosophy meaning is grounded not in some extra-linguistic reality or activity but in language itself. Linguistic philosophy — sometimes called ordinary language philosophy — arose as a philosophical movement in England following World War II in opposition to such other philosophical traditions as Hegelianism and Marxism and scientific positivism, and was originally closely associated with the thought of the later Ludwig Wittgenstein, especially his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953). Other major practitioners have included Gilbert Ryle, J.L. Austin, P.F. Strawson. The basic approach is to attempt to pay careful attention to linguistic usage on the grounds that “the meaning of a word is its use in the language” (Philosophical Investigations I, §43). Language itself consists of a number of “language games,” and learning how to play with words in any language game is to learn their meaning. Particular philosophical problems about themeaning of reality or knowledge are often argued to arise when one fails
to play a language game correctly. Philosophy thus functions, as it were, like an umpire of language, and thereby to dissolve or solve problems. One very general linguistic philosophical approach to the philosophy of engineering would be to describe engineering as a particular language game. More specifically, one may note that philosophy of engineering — like virtually all other regionalizations of philosophy — might well begin with a definition of engineering. But what engineeriny is might be better determined by how the word “engineering” and its cognates and associated terms (such as invention, innovation, design, technology, science, etc.) are used, especially in relation to each other. From a linguistic philosophical perspective, it would be appropriate to begin not so much with our experiences of engineering but with the words we use to talk about such experiences. A second line of reflection could consider the kinds of words used and the ways they are used within engineering. Any attempt to reflect critically on language use within engineering would nevertheless need to consider what might be added by such reflection over and above the technical use itself — which is a question that has been raised about linguistic philosophy as a whole.
4. CONCLUSION
A linguistic philosophy of engineering is but one possible approach to a philosophical engagement with engineering. It is at the same time an under developed approach, with serious promise. At the same time, it is not the only possible approach. There are undoubtedly strengths and weaknesses in each approach. The most robust engagement of philosophy with engineering will entail a pluralistic engagement from more than one philosophical tradition.
5. REFERENCES [1] Durbin, Paul T., ed. (1991) Critical Perspectives on
Nonacademic Science and Engineering. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press.
[2] Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1953) Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.
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Initiating discussions on the Philosophy of Engineering: some results from the UK
Andrew Fox University of Plymouth
Drake Circus Devon, PL4 8AA
+44 (0) 1752 233 664
Andrew Crudgington Institution of Civil Engineers One Great George Street
London, SW1P 3AA +44 (0) 20 7222 7722
[email protected] ABSTRACT
In the autumn of 2005 an initiative was launched with the support of the Institution of Civil Engineers in the UK to explore the level of support and the scope for the development of a philosophy of engineering. The project included a review of institutional commitment to the development of a philosophy of engineering, the creation of an internet based discussion forum and a seminar was held to explore ways of incorporating a philosophy of engineering into the education and training of engineers and philosophers. This paper reports on the outcome of these activities and will suggest ways in which the project to develop a philosophy of engineering could be moved forward.
Categories and Subject Descriptors Philosophical reflections of practitioners
General Terms Management & Theory.
Keywords Philosophy, Engineering, Education
INTRODUCTION The idea of a philosophy related to the theory and practice of engineering is a new and emerging one. There exists only a few sources of reference for students with an interest in this subject but the body of literature is growing and when viewed from an international perspective there does appear to be a sufficient groundswell of interest to justify a more concerted effort to develop this field of enquiry.
This paper is not intended to provide a review of the literature relating to the philosophy of engineering but instead, seeks to give some indication of the support that exists within the professional engineering bodies in the UK for such an idea and will present views from practitioners and academics on issues of importance in the development of a philosophy of engineering.
Methodology The methodology adopted for this project included a number of elements:
1. Institutional survey
2. Practitioner discussion forum
3. Focus group seminar
The objective for the institutional survey was twofold, firstly to identify organisations that with an interest in supporting the research and secondly to identify individuals within those organizations with a personal interest and a capacity to support the project. The practitioner discussion forum, sought to judge the extent of support existing within the professional community of engineers and philosophers and to identify thematic areas of importance for the development of a philosophy of engineering. The focus group seminar was held approximately four months after the launch of the e-forum. The seminar was open to forum member and others from within the professional engineering and philosophy community. Forum attendees were asked to address some specific questions relevant to the development of a philosophy of engineering and to make recommendations as to the best way of moving the project forward. The seminar included reports on discussions from the e-forum and presentations from projects of a similar nature before turning to a series of short brainstorming group exercises.
Conclusions The project has created a valuable database of discussions on topics of relevance to a philosophy of engineering and aided in the promotion and development of other activities in this area. The outputs from the discussion forum have provided a important insight for academics and practitioners with an interest in developing a more philosophical perspective in the education and training of engineering and philosophy students.
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Quo Vadis, Humans?Engineering the Survival of the Human Species
Extended Abstract
Billy V. KoenThe University of Texas/Austin
Austin, Texas, [email protected]
Since life first appeared on Earth some 3.8 billionyears ago, it has been estimated that more than99.9% of all species have gone extinct.[2]
Quo Vadis, Humans?1
The objectives of this paper are to develop a theoreticallydefensible framework for answering this paramount questionand to serve as a first example of an Applied Philosophy ofEngineering.
1. INTRODUCTIONYou and I are participating in a magnificent ex-periment to see whether Nature’s latest wrinklethe human species armed with its new weaponintelligence has survival value.
So begins the seminal book of this article, Discussion ofthe Method: conducting the engineer’s approach to problemsolving, published by Oxford University Press in 2003.[1]
It defines the Universal Method for solving any problembased on the method of the engineer. Method in hand:what more important problem is there to tackle thanthat of our own precarious survival? In effect, we seekto engineer the survival of the human species. I invite you toweld with me our species’ unique weapon intelligence in theform of Universal Method to beat the almost unsurmount-able odds we confront.
For convenience this paper is divided into three parts: thedefinition of engineering method, its generalization to uni-versal method, and engineering human survival.
1Quo vadis is Latin for ”Where are you going?”
Workshop for Philosophy and Engineering Oct. 2007 Delft, NLc©Billy V. Koen
2. DEFINITION OFENGINEERING METHOD
We begin with an increasingly popular definition of engi-neering:
The engineering method (often called engineer-ing design) is the use of heuristics to cause thebest change in a poorly understood situation withinthe available resources.
This definition contains important words that are being usedin a sense peculiar to the engineer and are highly chargedphilosophically. We can only consider two of them, theheuristic and the engineer’s notion of best at this time. Anauxiliary concept, the state-of-the-art, will also be neededbefore developing the framework for human survival.
A heuristic is anything that provides a plausible aid or di-rection in the solution of a problem but is in the final anal-ysis unjustified, incapable of justification, and potentiallyfallible. Engineering heuristics affect the amount of risk as-sumed, the allocation of resources, and the correct engineer-ing attitude when solving problems. In addition, the defi-nition of an engineering heuristic includes all of the ordersof magnitude, graphical correlations, factors of safety, andmathematical equations used throughout engineering prac-tice. When the word heuristic is used in the definition of en-gineering, it is not to imply that the engineer uses heuristicsonly from time to time to aid in the solution of particularlyintractable problems as might be said of a mathematician.The specific claim made in this paper is that the engineeringmethod and the use of heuristics is an absolute identity.
What is to be taken as best by the engineer and by thelayman (undoubtedly derived from Plato) are strikingly dif-ferent. In actual practice we universally implement the en-gineer’s concept while pledging allegiance to that of Plato.
Best for an engineer is a heuristically determined optimumin a rich multi-variant space including technical, ethical,aesthetic, and humanistic criteria. These criteria are com-mensurated heuristically. The choice of criteria and theirweighings are determined by a heuristically defined context.
The Greek philosopher, Plato, saw things differently. Hetaught that Ideal Forms of such concepts as a circle, justice,
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beauty, the good, etc. actually exist in a realm inaccessibleto the ordinary person and what we take to be these conceptsin our world are pale shadows of these Ideal Forms.2 TheseIdeal Forms were ordered in a hierarchy culminating in theultimate form of the Good.
The crucial thing to notice is that the progression from goodto better to best is along uni-variant lines. There is also noinfluence and certainly no commensuration between sepa-rate Ideal Forms.
The term state-of-the-art3 is a valuable concept that allowsus to understand what the engineer does and it is done. Itcan be generalized for use outside of engineering to greateffect. We will need it in a general sense throughout theremainder of this paper, but in this section we consider itsuse in engineering.
Engineers learn the engineering heuristics they use everyday from books, in school, and by observing the actualworld around them. It is convenient to use the symbol,sota|individual;t, to represent the set of heuristics, the state-of-the-art or—to use an acronym—the sota to refer to theengineering heuristics available to a specific individual at aspecific time.
3. GENERALIZATION TOUNIVERSAL METHOD
Now we insist that not only is everything in engineeringa heuristic, but that indeed everything is a heuristic. Incapsule form, the present claim is that All is heuristic.and, hence, universal method becomes the use of heuristics.
By All is meant All. All includes this claim itself, the wordsfrom which it is composed, and the grammar and logic ituses. If its self-referential nature is worrisome, just remem-ber that self-reference is also a heuristic in a world in whichAll is heuristic. In fact, the present claim is not even thatAll is heuristic is true, because, of course, truth is itself alsoa heuristic. What is being claimed is something like All isheuristic is the best heuristic (using best in the sense of theengineer as the optimum in a weighted space.)
For the unconvinced, we now turn to science, a notion thatmakes strong claims that it gives true knowledge, and in-sist that Science is just a collection or set of heuristics orsota|science;t is itself just one more good heuristic.
• Remembering that Godel’s Proof is a constructive proofthat demonstrates that arithmetic (the axioms that give usthe fact that 2 + 2 = 4), indeed all of mathematics, and alldeductive systems sufficiently rich to encompass the expres-sive power of arithmetic are either incomplete or inconsis-tent;
• Remembering that the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR)thought experiment and Bell’s experimental confirmation ofit cast doubt on causality (Or as the celebrated physicist,
2Plato’s Theory of Forms was first fully developed in thePlatonic dialogue, Phaedo.3It is cited in its present form as early as 1910 in an engi-neering manual on gas turbines.
Planck, has characterized it, ”Causality is neither true orfalse. It is a most valuable heuristic principle to guide sci-ence in the direction of promising returns in ever progressivedevelopment.”);
• Remembering that there are many logic systems: includ-ing the Laws of thought, Aristotelian logic, Symbolic logic,Multivalue logic, Quantum logic—just to stick with those inthe Western tradition. With such a multitude of logic sys-tems from which to choose, how are we to select one to usein a specific instance—surely not logically? Heuristically,then?
• Remembering that hypnotism and its ability to make apeople see things that are not there, not see things thatare present, and forget that they were ever hypnotized castsserious doubt on perception; and, finally,
• Remembering that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principleattacks our knowledge and certainty of the two sets of con-jugate variables, (position and momentum) and (time andenergy), and that Schrodinger’s cat’s questions our knowl-edge of physical reality ; (but the list goes on and on)
can we doubt that sota|science,t is just a good—in fact, forsome odd reason we seem compelled to believe, a very good—heuristic. It provides a plausible aid or direction in the so-lution of problems but is in the final analysis unjustified, in-capable of justification, and potentially fallible. It dependson such demonstrable heuristics as arithmetic, mathematics,deduction, perception, position, momentum, time, energy,reality to name only a few concepts tinged with doubt.
With more time, we could demonstrate that sota|philosophy;t,sota|liberalarts;t, sota|humanities;t, etc. exist until at last weare compelled to accept that All is heuristic, that an overallsota, sota|overall;t exists, and that Universal method as theUse of heuristics are good heuristics based on a preponder-ance of the evidence.
4. ENGINEERING HUMAN SURVIVALSota|overall;t defined above is the consilience of all humanconcepts on a common heuristic basis. It contains the sub-sotas that define an American, sota|American;t, the sota thatdefines science, sota|science;t, and that of good government,sota|good govern;t, etc.. In fact, there is a sota representingyou at this moment, sota|you,t, and, of course, one definingme. It is worthy of note that this discussion depends criti-cally upon the intersection of these two sotas and could nottake place at all if you and I did not share important heuris-tics in common such as language, culture, and so forth. Thisoverall sota, sota|overall;t, and the ability to partition it intosubsotas is the framework for human survival promised atthe outset.
These subsotas have fuzzy4 boundaries since different peo-ple will define a concept slightly differently. At one time oranother, opinions as to which heuristics are essential for adefinition of human have emphasized the soul, mind, and
4The term fuzzy is being used in a technical sense. Setmembership depends on a probability function instead ofbeing all or nothing.
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body. Definitions have ranged from the rational animal, thefeatherless biped, the image of God, or the animal with lan-guage ability. For others, the human is but an illusion cre-ated by the heuristics of division, categorization, and space.Ultimately, human is human-made by the person choosingwhich heuristics to include in the subsota to define the hu-man. Taken as a whole, the concept human is a fuzzy subsetof the overall set of all heuristics.
These fuzzy subsotas are also a function of time. For ex-ample, many candidates have been proposed for the unitof evolution. At one time or the other the breeding indi-vidual, the taxon5, a portion of the gene pool, DNA-in-thecell, and the flexible organism-in-its environment have beenadvocated as the basic element that survives or is selectedagainst in the process of evolution. Each of these conceptsis a heuristic depending for its definition on other heuristicsthat have been taken from the Western scientific tradition.[1,DOM page 248]
Over time modern science is rendering many of these classicsuggestions for the unit of evolution obsolete.
• January 25, 2005 Scientists have begun blurring theline between human and animal by producing chimeras–a hybrid creature that’s part human, part animal.6
• Chinese scientists at the Shanghai Second Medical Uni-versity in 2003 successfully fused human cells withrabbit eggs. The embryos were reportedly the firsthuman-animal chimeras successfully created.
• In Minnesota last year researchers at the Mayo Cliniccreated pigs with human blood flowing through theirbodies.
For convenience, we will represent the combination of thephilosophical definitions of human and the units of evolu-tion by sota|human;t. We cannot predict what heuristics willdefine the human in the future, but one thing is certain—snuff out sota|human;t and you snuff out the human species.
What do we mean when we speak of the survival of the hu-man species? Since the fuzzy sota|human;t changes in time,we can simply hope that it remains on the main line of evo-lution.
There is another subsota of importance to our quest. It isthe set of heuristics deemed essential for achieving that goal,the sota|heu. human survival;t. The paper upon which thisextended abstract is based will discuss the kinds of heuristicsthis set should contain to be effective.
For now we must be satisfied with one category, the meta-heuristic. A metaheuristic is a heuristic to be sure, but itis one that is also content-free or one whose only content
5A taxonomic category or group, such as a phylum, order,family, genus, or species.6In Greek mythology, the Chimera is a monster, depictedas an animal with the head of a lion, the body of a she-goat, and the tail of a dragon. It terrorized Lycia, but waseventually killed by the Corinthian hero Bellerophon.
concerns other heuristics. For instance, the heuristic, Allis heuristic, is the quintessential metaheuristic. It does notpertain to any specific religion, country, government or othercontroversial subsets. It concerns only other heuristics—indeed, it concerns all other heuristics. Many engineeringheuristics are properly classified as metaheuristics as can beseen by the engineering heuristic that aids in the allocationof resources such as the admonition to Allocate resources tothe weak link and others that control of the amount of risk tobe assumed such as the admonition to Make small changesin the state-of-the-art. The present challenge is to developthe most effective heuristics for human survival with specialemphasis on those that do not cause controversy betweenindividuals. We do not want sota|human;t to self-destruct.
Figure 1: Sotas for Human Survival
With reference to Figure 1, the goal of this paper subentitledEngineering Human Survival may now be succinctly stated:
From sota|overall;t, seek the sota|heur. for human survival;t
that will make the sota|human;t persist into the dis-tant future.
5. CONCLUSIONSIn conclusion, this paper need only ask once again
Quo Vadis, Humans?
and tender the invitation to each of you to join me in findingthe best heuristics for sota|heu. human survival;t, using best inthe sense of the engineer, of course.
If we fail to find them, I doubt sota|nature;t will give morethan a magnificent shrug.
6. REFERENCES[1] B. V. Koen. Discussion of the Method: Conducting the
Engineer’s Approach to Problem Solving. OxfordUniversity Press, New York, March 2003.
[2] D. M. Raup. Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? W.W. Norton, New York, 1991.
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[Extended Abstract]
Why Philosophy? Why Now? Engineering Responds to the Crisis of a Creative Era
David E. Goldberg University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Urbana, IL 61801 USA
Keywords Philosophy and engineering, creative era, paradigms, Socratic dialectic, Aristotelian data mining, construction of engineering reality
1. INTRODUCTION At this first Workshop on Philosophy and Engineering (WPE-2007), it seems useful to reflect on what may have caused such a gathering to come to pass and why it may have happened now. After all, philosophers and engineers haven’t had much use for each other over the years. Certainly philosophers have been reflecting seriously on technology for some time [1], and engineers have occasionally waxed philosophical [1]. Indeed there has been the occasional individual engineer turned philosopher (most notably, Wittgenstein), and the occasional philosopher turned engineer (for example, Mark Bedau), but a formal meeting of engineering and philosophical minds is a rarity, and the occasion begs us to ask why this event has happened and to question why it has happened at this moment in history.
The purpose of this talk is to consider these questions from the standpoint of an engineering educator and researcher in the opening moments of the 21st century. I start by considering some of the ways in which philosophers and engineers are odd companions. I continue by examining the unsettling creative imperative of our times, how it has been shaped by certain technological and economic forces, and how these forces may be spurring a reexamination of the nature and practice of engineering. . This leads to the consideration of philosophy as crisis response tool and to a call for the injection of at least three elements of philosophical thought into the education of today’s engineers.
2. STRANGE BEDFELLOWS That a meeting of philosophers and engineers should take place at all is particularly strange if we recount some of the differences between them. On the one hand, philosophers are humanists and engineers are technologists. Philosophers are contemplative and engineers are action oriented. Philosophers are articulate and engineers are sometimes linguistically naïve. Philosophers delight in the ambiguity of contradictory positions and engineers eschew ambiguity with a vengeance. Philosophers pursue reflection in itself, and engineers use reflection as a tool.
With such a load of differences, it seems odd that those gathered at the workshop might have anything to talk about at all, but I hasten to add that generally philosophers and engineers do share a passion for logic. Moreover, it is probably safe to assume that the philosophers and engineers gathered at this workshop share a greater interest in technology and
philosophy, respectively, than we might find in corresponding populations at large. Nonetheless, the coming together of almost polar opposites deserves a better explanation than can be obtained by citing a single common interest or a fortuitously biased sample of individuals.
3. THEN AND NOW? The Hegelian habit of seeking developmental explanations in countervailing forces in history may be useful in this regard. In particular, I see engineering as practiced today as a particular paradigm developed in response to the technological, governmental, and economic conditions following World War II. I then argue, as many others have, that our current times demand increased creativity and inventiveness particularly in the advanced economies in ways that recommend change in engineering patterns of thought.
3.1 World War II and Engineering Today Engineering as taught today can be understood as largely a response to the technological and economic forces in place after World War II. At that time, economies of scale were dominant, large hierarchical organizations were the rule, and engineers became increasingly scientific in response to perceptions of the status of science after the war. Whether this status was deserved and whether the reaction should have been as strong as it was can be debated [2]; however there is little doubt that these tendencies were reinforced by governmental actions [3] that funded basic scientific research in post-war government labs and universities, thereby encouraging academic engineers to join what was then a new money chase.
3.2 Friedman, Florida, Pink & All That A number of current authors [4-6] have looked at the globalizing technological and economic changes around the world and concluded that returns to routine analytical work, including engineering, are diminishing, and returns to creativity are increasing. Friedman’s The World is Flat has become a shorthand symbol for these thoughts, and flat worlds are almost everywhere remarked. Pink’s analysis in A Whole New Mind [6] has a number of useful clues for actionable change in curriculum, but a key distinction can be made between the category enhancers, workers who merely improve upon existing category of products, and category creators, those who are sufficiently creative to develop and market successful new products and services.
The point here is not to follow these analyses in detail, but rather to understand that the world of engineering has changed in a way that demands attention, and to observe that those who teach engineering continue their allegiance to a paradigm developed in earlier times.
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4. KUHN & THE RESPONSE TO CRISIS The use of the term “paradigm” in the previous paragraph was, of course, an allusion to the book that made that term famous. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions shook up both the philosophy and history of science in important ways, but here we are concerned with Kuhn’s observations with respect to scientists, their response to crisis, and the role of philosophy [7]:
…I think, particularly in periods of acknowledged crisis that scientists have turned to philosophical analysis as a device for unlocking the riddles of their fields. Some have not generally needed or wanted to be philosophers. Indeed, normal science usually holds creative philosophy at arm’s length, and probably for good reason…But that is not to say that the search for assumptions cannot be an effective way to weaken the grip of a tradition upon the mind and to suggest the basis for a new one. (p. 88)
Kuhn is suggesting that scientists rarely turn to philosophy explicitly except in cases where old scientific paradigms are ripe for overthrow because of an accumulation of anomalies that resist “puzzle solving” within the rules of the paradigm. Here I argue that a key reason we are now meeting in Delft, at least from the perspective of engineers and engineering educators among us, is that, like physics at the turn of the 20th century, engineering is in considerable crisis because the engineering paradigm of WW2 and the cold war is unable to effectively design artifacts of a postmodern creative age.
5. CENTRIPETAL FORCES OF THE O’S The reliance on science-push engineering unleashed at the end of WW2 continues unabated. Engineering deans like to talk about the O’s of 21st century technology: nanotechnology, biotechnology, and information technology, and without a doubt nano and bio are members of the science-push club. For nano- and biotechnology, the paradigm of the WW2 and the cold war work pretty well, except that the pace of change and the relentless push of new products and services into unfamiliar territory does up the ante along lines suggested by creative age theorists.
Having said this, information technology responds to both technological opportunity and human concerns in unprecedented ways. Where in the cold war, humans were error to be eliminated from the loop, today humans, in some sense, are the loop. Cursory reflection about Google, Ebay,
Facebook, and other examples of information technology of our age reveals the integral nature of humans as part and parcel of the systems engineers must design today. Although the push for new categories is as fast and furious as in the other O’s, the need to understand another O, homo sapiens, and to develop better sociotechnology pushes engineering into areas where it has only made limited forays. Thus, the challenges of category creation and the challenge of homo sapiens in the loop help push engineers to reflect on the nature of their education, training, and occupation.
6. THREE LESSONS The remainder of the talk considers three lessons of ancient and modern philosophy for the creation of new categories of product and service. These lessons have been explored in a one-hour course (14 lectures) entitled Creative Modeling for Technology Visionaries taught online (here) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
To develop effective methods of modeling novel product/service situations, the course considers three elements: (1) Socratic dialectic, (2) Aristotelian data mining, and (3) construction of engineering reality. The empirical success of the first two items in bootstrapping the Western project of knowledge argues for their injections in other situations where systematic creative understanding must be obtained. The third element carries The Construction of Social Reality [8] into the realm of engineering with examples drawn from Web2.0 systems design.
7. REFERENCES [1] Mitcham, C. 1994 Thinking through Technology: The Path
between Engineering and Philosophy. University of Chicago Press.
[2] Goldberg, D. E. 1996 Changes in Engineering Education: One Myth,, Two Scenarios, Three Foci. J. of Eng. Ed. 85, 2 (Apr. 1996) 107-116.
[3] Bush, V. 1945 Science the Endless Frontier. USGPO. http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/nsf50/vbush1945.htm
[4] Friedman, T. L. 2005 The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
[5] Florida, R. 2002 The Rise of the Creative Class. Basic Books.
[6] Pink, D. 2005 A Whole New Mind. Riverhead Books. [7] Kuhn, T. S. 1970 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press. [8] Searle, J. 1997 The Construction of Social Reality. Free
Press.
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It Isn’t Rocket Science!”: Changing the Public Perception of Engineering
Walter Vincenti Stanford University,
author of What Engineers Know and How They Know it
FORMAT An Interactive Panel Discussion with Walter Vincenti via Live Video Conference (Palo Alto <–> Delft).
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Integrity and the Ethical Responsibility of EngineersAlastair Gunn
University of Waikato, co-author of Engineering, Ethics, and
the Environment
ABSTRACT Everyone agrees that the responsibility of engineers includes a commitment to technical excellence and fidelity to client and employer. There is also increasing acceptance that engineers also have social and environmental responsibilities. I argue that these responsibilities extend beyond the engineer’s own work;
that an engineer has broad responsibilities to expose and report all instances of risks to public safety and the environment I defend this position by appealing to the much-used but little–analyzed concept of integrity.
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Teaching ethics to engineering students: from clean concepts to dirty tricks
The impact of practical circumstances and personal relationships on ethical decision-making
Sybrand van der Zwaag Faculty of Aerospace Engineering
TU Delft Kluyverweg 1 2629 HS Delft
Tel: +31.15.2782248
Otto Kroesen Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, TU
Delft Jaffalaan 5
2628 BX Delft Tel: +31.15.2785262
Keywords Ethics, communication, decision-making, management of technology, risk, role-game
1. INTRODUCTION Due to the personal commitment of one of its former professors, the faculty of Aerospace Engineering of the TU Delft has a long tradition of offering an introductory course in which basic ethical concepts and issues are presented and made operational in an aerospace relevant context. The course has now been a compulsory item of the aerospace engineering curriculum for several years. Learning goals of the course in general are aimed at making students: (1) sensitive to moral issues, (2) able to apply a framework of ethical concepts to practical cases and situations, (3) a competent player in policy discussions about moral issues in their future profession.
2. ROLE GAME The 7 weeks (3ECTS credit points) course originally was concluded with a role game about the Challenger disaster (1986) in which the chain of decisions leading to the fatal launch of the Challenger space shuttle under adverse weather conditions is re-enacted. In this game the 7 principal actors (engineers and managers) are described by their professional background and managerial responsibilities. Although the game was in general well appreciated by the students, in their evaluations they pointed out that the game did not fully reflect real life situations as the in-retrospect more correct decision not to launch is known a-priori. Students took this into account in their technical and ethical deliberations during the game, which gave the game a slightly clinical aspect but nevertheless allows the students to apply the ethical concepts taught during the course. Furthermore course evaluators with a professional experience in industry, pointed out that group management decisions are not only made on the basis of the technical input from experts but also by that of the
non-experts whose input is colored by earlier personal relationships with the experts in the group creating higher or lower levels of ‘blind’ confidence in their colleagues. To their opinion personal relationships of trust and distrust, like and dislike, do affect moral decisions.
3. ToFlyOrNotToFly Hence a new game has been developed, named ToFlyOrNotToFly, which deals with a hypothetical but realistic situation in the year 2015. The case deals with the aftermath of a minor accident with a new TU Delft developed passenger plane which is to have its maiden flight in front of national and foreign dignitaries the very next morning after the accident. The number of actors in the game has been increased to 10 and now also includes non-technical actors such as a Director of Personnel, a PR manager and even the Prime Minister. For each role, not only the technical background is described but also interpersonal relations with some of the other actors. The interpersonal relations can vary from very friendly to clearly hostile. Early experience with the new game has shown that indeed interpersonal relationships clearly influence and sometimes swamp the ethical side of the decision making process in the group. Due to the new concept of the game the students have a much better insight into the effect of ‘trust’ and ‘communication’ [1] on the quality of decision making process and also appreciate that ethical reflections are much harder to make under high tension conditions [2].
4. LEARNING GOALS The experience with this role game might affect learning goals of courses on ethics in general. Although the former role game went beyond the habitually recognized learning goals for ethical courses in technical curricula in that it also trained the personal ability of students to participate in policy discussions about moral issues, it did not include the aspect of interpersonal relationships and its effect on ethical decisions. If relationships of trust and distrust, like and
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dislike are integrated into the learning process, students actually are also trained to be aware of such relationships in the process of decision-making. The new approach of the final role play in this MSc course also affects the ethical discourse as such. It points out that the quality of moral decisions depends at least as much on the group process as on private deliberations based on theoretical ethical concepts [3].
REFERENCES [1] Habermas, J., 1981, Theorie des kommunikativen
Handelns (Frankfurt M: Suhrkamp Verlag), who extensively develops this side of communication as part of our lives. Also: Habermas, J Between Facts and Norms – Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1996
[2] Rosenstock-Huessy, E. Origin of Speech, Argo Books, Vermont, 1981. He considers crisis to be the origin of speech in that crisis makes it urgent to speak.
[3] Bauman, Z. Postmodern ethics, Blackwell, Oxford, 1993, p.183, 184: “Negotiation implies an ongoing process, but also a process without a direction guaranteed beforehand, nor one whose outcomes can be surely anticipated. In such a setting, the triumph of morality is in no way assured in advance; it is touch and go all the way. Neither solemn preaching nor stern legal rules will do much to make the fate of morality less precarious. It is the realization that this is the case, that all and any promises to stop this being the case are – must be – naive or fraudulent, that is morality’s best chance. It is also its only hope.”
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Questioning the status and stakes of engineering ethicsChristelle Didier
Département d’éthique Université catholique de Lille
41, rue du Port 59000 Lille
France [email protected]
ABSTRACT In the United States, engineering ethics is often classified among "professional ethics". The great majority of American engineering ethics manuals explain why students should rank engineers among the "professionals". Still the existence of ethical stakes bound to the practice of the engineering profession has perhaps no link with the fact that engineering is or is not a "profession". It was already the opinion of Karl Pavlovic who considered it a "parasitic" question. (Pavlovic,1983) In Canada and Spain, there is no doubt that engineers are “true professionals”. In France and Germany, the question does not arise because it is not relevant: there is neither a legal status, nor a specific social recognition, for the "professionals". The stake of engineers’ professional ethics differs according to the cultural and legal contexts. Ethical stakes, on the other hand, are very often similar. To classify engineering ethics among the "applied ethics" has other drawbacks: it implies that it would be possible to define beforehand "the" moral theory or the code article which is advisable to use. Following Carl Mitcham’s approach, we considers that the focal point of engineering ethics is neither a status (a "profession"), nor a knowledge ("technology", “engineering sciences"), but a "practice", a form of action.
Engineering presents the characteristic of being both scientific and economic (Layton, 1986). It is also a combination between the work and the capital (Downey, Lucena, 1995). It is finally a "situated practice", both technical and non-technical, which contributes to building up a "conceptual and political network". (Bijker, Law, 1992). Engineering must be understood as a hybrid (social and technical) form of action developing in a complex context (and not merely complicated) where political, social and economic stakes are intermingled. Although having something to do with the sciences, the engineer’s work is not that of the scientific researcher: engineering is a "social experimentation" (Martin, 1983). The product of engineering is not knowledge, but an object which transforms the world (Mitcham, 1997). Engineering is characterized by potential power and its uncertain impacts on its natural and human environment, today as well as in the future. Finally, engineering is not a simple resolution of problems: it is an art which requires imagination and creativity (Davis, 1998). The activity of industrial conception (the "design") is considered by most researchers as the central and most specific engineering act.
In the first part of this communication, we shall present my understanding of the status of engineering ethics “in context”, i.e. in taking into account the fact that social, cultural and professional issues may differ from own country to another. (1) Then we shall propose a definition of engineering and describe what we consider the main ethical issues raised by engineering’s characteristics: the complexity of its context, the
power and irreversibility of its human and natural impacts, and the central part in engineering of the design activity. (2)
Having described engineering as a type of action which takes place in a complex social and technical network, jeopardising multiple animate and inanimate beings and consisting fundamentally in transforming ideas into concrete forms, we shall study engineers’ individual responsibility, as well as their collective responsibility (as members with other engineers of a profession or as member with their colleagues of a company). We shall first recall the “problem of many hands” (Thompson, 1980) i.e. the phenomenon of dilution of the individual responsibility in large organizations. (3.1) We shall also recall the unavoidable responsibility of the engineers, which is due to their training, their mission and their position in the social space. This responsibility is also due to the fact engineers contribute collectively to the creation of phenomena whose effects on the social and natural environment are important, and sometimes irreversible. (3.2) In order to draw the contours of the engineers’ moral responsibility, we shall answer to three questions: what is the specific knowledge of engineers? What are their concrete margins of operation? What is their moral legitimacy to take into account the engineering ethical stakes within the framework of their professional activities? (3.3)
REFERENCES [1] Bijker Wiebe E., Law John, dir., 1992, Shapping
Technology / Bulding Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
[2] Davis Michael, 1998, Thinking like an Engineer, Study in the Ethics of a Profession, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
[3] Downey Gary Lee, Lucena Juan, 1995, “Engineering Studies”, in Sheila Jasanoff, Gerald E. Markle, James C. Peterson, Trevor Pinch, Handbook of Sciences and Technological Studies, Sage Publication, Thousand Oaks, CA, pp. 168-188.
[4] Layton Edwin T., 1986, The Revolt of the Engineers, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore & London, (2nd ed.)
[5] Martin Mike W., Schinzinger Roland, 1983, Ethics in Engineering, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York. (1995, 2nd ed)
[6] Mitcham Carl, 1997, Thinking Ethics in Technology. Hennebach Lectures, 1995-1996, Colorado School of Mines.
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[7] Pavlovic Karl, 1983, “Autonomy and Obligations: Is there an Engineering Ethics?” in James Schaub, Karl Pavlovic, dir., Engineering Professionalism and Ethics, pp. 223-232.
[8] Thompson Dennis F., 1980, “Moral Responsibility of Public Officials: The Problem of Many Hands”, American
Political Science Review, Vol. 74, No. 4 (Dec., 1980), pp. 905-916.
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Principles of Engineering Ethics in the Absence of Moral Theory
Heinz C. Luegenbiehl Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
5500 Wabash Avenue Terre Haute, IN 47803
ABSTRACT Over the years, as philosophers have taken a lead role in the development of engineering ethics, a significant amount of emphasis has been placed on moral theory as an instrument for discussing specific ethical issues in engineering. This has made some engineers teaching engineering ethics uncomfortable, as they have felt unqualified in the theoretical dimensions of ethics. One unfortunate development arising from this has been a slow reemergence of discussions of ethics without any theoretical foundation at all; a purely case discussion based approach. Perhaps an even more troubling development for moral theory based discussions has been the recent spread of considerations of engineering ethics to non-Western countries. In those countries there is little knowledge of, or interest in, Western moral theories, nor do these necessarily fit with local moral beliefs. The introduction of traditional engineering ethics in such societies thus faces not only communication problems, but also questions regarding its fundamental validity. This paper, in order to begin overcome these difficulties, proposes to derive a fundamental set of principles of engineering ethics independent of reliance on Western moral theory. Instead, it attempts to derive them from a definition of engineering itself, once which can be justified globally. Based on a specific conception of engineering as a universally possible activity, I derive a set of obligations and rights which specifically apply to engineers. These guiding principles will need to be somewhat fluid in application because none of them can be considered absolute or completely determined, needing instead to be thought through in the process of application to specific instances. They will, however, provide a general framework on which to base ethical engineering judgments. What I am proposing is similar to the development of a code of ethics for engineers like those which have been promulgated by a number of engineering societies throughout the world, with the difference being that codes come to the engineer as finished products with no justification for the individual entries being attached to them. They thus appear as instruments of external authority, in a similar fashion to laws. They share the further characteristic with law that they are ultimately political instruments based on compromise. My process is instead intended to have engineers see the why behind the adoption of specific principles and to therefore have a rational basis for following them.
To begin the process of determining a set of appropriate ethical principles for engineering, the first step is to appropriately define the term “engineering.” The definition to be employed
in the paper is: Engineering is the transformation of the natural world, using scientific principles and mathematics, in order to achieve some desired practical end. This is a relatively broad definition which attempts to capture the great variety of activities possible for engineers. The definition also attempts to be value neutral as far as possible. It clearly, however, reflects the modern scientific foundation of engineering, rather than the craft tradition, and this in itself involves a value judgment. Once a definition has been established, ethical principles specifically applicable to engineers can then be derived. The basic premise in doing so will be: Using the ability to reason that is central to all modern engineering activities, what makes certain types of actions appropriate or inappropriate, given our definition of engineering? Key elements to remember are that the world should not be left less well off as a result of the transformation, and that costs incurred in the process should not be catastrophic. In addition, when speaking of costs or benefits, our final concern is the potential impact on the lives of human beings, as was stipulated in relation to our definition of “ethics.” In other words, ethical discussion in relation to transforming the natural world will determine the appropriate application of engineers’ abilities. As a preview, listed below are the principles derived using the above indicated methodology. Included in the list are principles of ethical business practice, which are necessary for a contextual understanding of ethical engineering practice, but, given presentation time constraints, these will not be derived in this paper.
LIST OF ETHICAL PRINCIPLES FOR ENGINEERING AND BUSINESS Principles for Corporations: Corporations should endeavor to
1. Avoid producing unnecessary harm to people inside and outside the organization through corporate actions.
2. Ensure that all stakeholders of the organization are treated fairly and justly.
3. Ensure that all applicable ethical laws and regulations are followed within the organization.
4. Protect members of the organization against internal discrimination and harassment.
5. Make all hiring, compensation, promotion, and firing decisions based on merit.
6. Ensure that all legitimate corporate contracts are upheld.
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Principles for Employees: Corporate employees should endeavor to:
1. Obey all legitimate, job-related directives. 2. Perform their contracted duties on at least an
industry-standard level. 3. Uphold the principle of confidentiality in relation to
knowledge gained at a present or past employer. 4. Avoid actions which harm the corporation while
acting on behalf of the organization. 5. Be honest in their business relationships with others. 6. Enforce all organizational and employee ethical
principles when in a position of authority.
Principles for Engineers: Engineers should endeavor to:
1. Based on their expertise, keep members of the public safe from serious negative consequences resulting from their development and implementation of technology.
2. Ensure that fundamental rights of human beings will not be negatively impacted as a result of their work with technology.
3. Avoid damage to the animal kingdom and the natural environment which would result in serious negative consequences, including long-term ones, to human life.
4. Engage only in engineering activities which they are competent to carry out.
5. Base their engineering decisions on scientific principles and mathematical analysis, and seek to avoid influence of extraneous factors.
6. Keep the public informed of their decisions which have the potential to seriously affect the public, and to be truthful and complete in their disclosures.
7. Understand and respect the non-moral cultural values of people they encounter in the course of fulfilling their engineering duties.
8. Refuse to participate in engineering activities which are claimed to reflect cultural practices but which violate the general ethical principles of engineering.
Intercultural Principles for Engineers:
1. Engineers should endeavor to understand and respect the non-moral cultural values of people they encounter in the course of fulfilling their engineering duties.
2. Engineers should endeavor to refuse to participate in engineering activities which are claimed to reflect cultural practices but which violate the general ethical principles of engineering.
Principles of Involvement for Engineers:
1. Principle of Public Participation: Engineers should seriously consider participating in public policy discussion regarding future applications of technology.
2. Principle of the Education of the Public: Engineers should seriously consider helping the public to understand the applications of technology in broader societal and global contexts.
3. Principle of Engineering Engagement: Engineers should seriously consider becoming involved, on a volunteer basis, in helping to improve the technological futures of those less fortunate than themselves.
Rights of Engineers as Employees: Like all other employees, engineers have the right to:
1. Be protected from unnecessary harm in the course of their employment.
2. Fair and just treatment by their employer. 3. Not be subjected to discrimination or harassment in
their place of employment. 4. Be treated by their employer based on merit, 5. Have their contract with their employer honored. 6. Disobey illegitimate directive of their superiors.
As a special category of employees, engineers have the right to:
1. Blow the whistle (externally or internally), if, in their judgment as engineers, the physical safety of the public will be endangered through their failure to act.
2. The resources necessary to perform their assigned task competently.
3. Inform the public of engineering decisions that have the potential to seriously affect the public, unless the principle of confidentiality would thereby be violated.
Fair compensation for their work, including the right to share equitably in gains realized from their contributions to intellectual property.
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Systems and Scenarios for a Philosophy of Engineering Darryl Farber
Science, Technology, and Society Program
Penn State University University Park, PA, USA
+1-814-865-3042 [email protected]
Martin T. Pietrucha Department of Civil and
Environmental Engineering Penn State University
University Park, PA USA +1-814-863-7306
Akhlesh Lakhtakia Department of Engineering
Science and Mechanics Penn State University
University Park, PA USA +1-814-863 4319
ABSTRACT William Wulf former President of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in his keynote address to an NAE workshop on Emerging Technologies and Ethical Issues in Engineering [1] stated, “When systems reach a sufficiently high level of complexity, it becomes impossible to predict their behavior. It’s not just hard to predict their behavior, it’s impossible to predict their behavior. The question can’t be answered by taking more things into account or thinking harder about the problem or using a new set of tools. At a certain threshold of complexity, it becomes impossible to predict all system behaviors (p.4).” Wulf goes on to say, “How can we make ethical decisions when we cannot predict what the outcomes will be? Yet doing nothing is, in fact, also doing something. We do not have the option of not doing anything and avoiding the ethical choice (p.6).” Charles Vest, President Emeritus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and current NAE President in his essay, “Educating Engineers for 2020 and Beyond” [2] continues this line of questioning, “As Wm. A. Wulf (2004) has warned us, we work every day with systems so complex that we cannot know all of their possible end states. Under those circumstances, how can we ensure that they are safe, reliable, and resilient? In other words, how can we practice engineering?” Vest in his essay identifies two frontiers of engineering systems. One is the nano-bio-information technology frontier. It is the engineering frontier of the small and fast. The other frontier is large scale socio-technical systems, for example transportation or energy systems, which are linked in complex ways. Wulf and Vest address an important philosophical issue: what is the relationship between our knowledge of technological systems and our design and use these systems? In creating nano-bio-information technologies or large scale socio-technical systems to address human concerns the intention is to improve the human condition. If we cannot predict the outcome of these complex systems, how do we know that the systems will serve to improve the human condition? How is the problem that Wulf and Vest raise a new one? How do we make intelligent, ethical engineering decisions when we do not know the outcome of our engineering? If we construct a bridge of advanced materials, how may we know the bridge will perform as expected? How do we know that there will not be a catastrophic failure? One answer is that models of the phenomena give us enough confidence that the technology or technological system will perform as expected. Another answer is through testing of the components. Of course accidents happen and that is why safety systems exist. We can also over-engineer. If a bridge needs to withstand forces of X, we build to 2X. Increases in our scientific understanding of forces on bridges enable us to estimate what X is and therefore what 2X is. We can create monitoring systems that enable us to
recognize possible problems in performance and give engineers warning to take corrective action. In the case of the failure of one part, we can build in a redundant system to take over the function of a failed component. We can create systems in the event of an accident that mitigates the effects, such as shock absorbers positioned around the bridges pillars to mitigate the force of an automobile crashing into it and airbags in cars to mitigate the impact to the automobile occupant. How do engineers make inferences about future engineering performance from the available evidence? How do engineers address the well established problem of induction and make intelligent, ethical decisions when the outcome is uncertain? The short answer is to create safety systems. There is another class of uncertainty in engineering outcomes. It is the impact of a technology over time. When we ask, “What is the impact of a technology?“ the question of impact must be related to frame of reference. Over what time scale are the impacts to be measured? What a technology “means” is going to depend on the perspective from which it is interpreted. From the point of view of creating a system that provides a specific output for a given set of inputs, its meaning may be whether it performs as expected. The George Washington Bridge spans the Hudson River and connects New York City with New Jersey. It was completed in 1931 and is a major automotive and truck crossing. The bridge performs its spanning function. The bridge, however, is part of the metropolitan transportation network so that when one asks about its function, the larger context is the bridge’s function as part of a transportation network. It is in this larger sense that we begin to get an understanding of Wulf and Vest’s question. The metropolitan New York-New Jersey region has grown substantially since the 1930s so that even though the G.W. Bridge is still a bridge, it is an evolving structure embedded in an evolving regional transportation system. The installation of information systems, such as an electronic toll collection system (EZ Pass) and traffic monitoring devices that alert drivers to the extent of expected delays have an effect on the traffic flow across the bridge and traffic flow in the surrounding region. One may imagine a scenario in which sensors embedded in cars convey location and speed information to a network of intelligent traffic controllers which in turn electronically adjust speed limits and access points in the region to achieve smooth flowing traffic patterns. The vehicle, bridge, and controllers become part of an interactive system. How may engineers create this type of intelligent control of the transportation system? The way to engineer this intelligence may not be through traditional engineering means of hierarchical design. As computer scientist and engineer W. Daniel Hillis, in The Pattern on the Stone [3], suggests that the traditional hierarchical approach to engineering may have its limits. “The
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reliance on a strict hierarchical structure is the Achilles heel of the engineering process, since it creates the kind of adamant inflexibility we associate with machines” (p. 143). Hillis goes on to say, “Products of engineering are inherently fragile, because each part of an engineered system must meet the design specifications of how it should interact with other parts. These specifications serve as a kind of contract between components. If one of the components breaks its part of the contract, the design assumptions of the systems are invalid, and the system breaks down in an unpredictable way.” In designing an intelligent transportation system that may include elements of nano-bio-information technology, it may be that the engineers designing the overall concept never fully understand the make up or the function of all of the components. What we would do according to Hillis is “arrange for intelligence to emerge from a complex series of interactions that we do not understand in detail (our emphasis) – that is a process less like engineering a machine and more like baking a cake or growing a garden. We will not engineer an artificial intelligence; rather we will set up the right conditions under which an intelligence can emerge” (p. 138). Hillis continues, “The greatest achievement of our technology may well be the creation of tools that allow us to go beyond engineering – that allow us to create more than we can understand” (p. 138). By not understanding a system then what are the implications for safety, reliance, and reliability? The answer is not clear. Hillis compares the human brain to the computer, the product of evolution with the product of hierarchical engineering design. As Hillis states, “A single error in a computer’s program can cause it to crash, but the
brain is usually able to tolerate bad ideas and incorrect information and even malfunctioning components. Individual neurons in the brain are constantly dying, and are never replaced; unless the damage is severe, the brain manages to adapt and compensate for these failures. (Ironically, as I was writing this chapter, my computer crashed and required rebooting.) Humans rarely crash” (p.144). Wulf and Vest raise an important question about what knowledge engineers must have to design safe and reliable technologies. It appears possible that if engineers embrace the processes of evolution as an engineering tool, then it may be that humans can create technologies that improve the human condition without really understanding why. This is the open question for further discussion.
REFERENCES [1] Wulf, William, A. 2004. Keynote Address. Emerging Technologies and Ethical Issues in Engineering: Papers from a Workshop, October 14-15, 2003. Washington, D.C: National Academies Press. [2] Vest, Charles, M. 2007. Educating Engineers for 2020 and Beyond. Grand Challenges for Engineering. National Academy of Engineering. Available at www.engineeringchallenges.org [3] Hillis, W. Daniel. 1999. A Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas that Make Computers Work. New York: Basic Books.
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MULTIPLE FACETS OF PHILOSOPHY AND ENGINEERING
Paul T. Durbin Emeritus Professor
Philosophy Department and Center for Energy and Environmental Policy
University of Delaware
ABSTRACT Is there a philosophy of engineering (singular)? My answer is no, and I use the metaphor of a diamond with many facets to bolster my negative answer. I base my views on discussions of engineering, of various sorts, in the literature of the Society for Philosophy and Technology; and, following the guidelines of engineer Billy Vaughn Koen, I mark the time period as 1975-2005, from the beginning of the society until the SPT conference in Delft in 2005. The diamond metaphor is useful for looking at the phenomenon of engineering both from the inside -- the inner crystalline structure, so to speak -- and from the outside of external criticism. Among inner facets, I look at engineering as a guild, with its own self-selected guidelines, professional associations, educational system, and place within the larger society in which it thrives. I hope that what I say reflects changes in the world of engineering, outside philosophical circles, in the same time period, not only in my home country of the USA but in the Netherlands, Germany, Great Britain, Spain (and indirectly in other countries, including Poland, Russia, China and Japan, among others), with which SPT has had contacts. But the primary focus is what philosophers, and a few engineers, have said in publications associated with SPT.
INTRODUCTION I base my views here on two of my books, Critical Perspectives on Nonacademic Science and Engineering (Lehigh University Press, 1991), a collection of essays intended to produce a philosophy of engineering; and Philosophy of Technology: In Search of Discourse Synthesis (published online in Techne, the journal of SPT, in 2007). In the latter book, a history of 30 years of controversies in SPT, I include three chapters directly devoted to competing philosophies of engineering -- engineering in general, computer and engineering ethics, and bioengineering/biotechnology -- as well as discussions of engineering philosophies in the Netherlands, Germany, and Spain. The theme throughout those discussions is that controversies in SPT related to engineering have sorted out fairly neatly into four types of philosophical approaches that emphasize (1) connections to science, (2) metaphysical critiques of the narrowness of the engineering approach to problem solving, along with two political approaches -- (3) pragmatic and (4) radical – which combine a positive use of engineering with political critiques of its social arrangements. My remarks here follow that outline, after
which I include a very brief mention of engineering education and professional regulation within engineering societies.
1. INSIDE THE DIAMOND: THE STRUCTURE OF ENGINEERING AS ENGINEERS SEE IT 1.1 The oldest tradition of philosophical discussion of engineering within SPT focuses on its relation to science and begins with the approach of the Canadian (originally Argentine) philosopher Mario Bunge. He calls his approach "exact philosophy" -- and he has many followers in many countries, from Spain (Miguel Angel Quintanilla) to Germany (Friedrich Rapp, with reservations) to Czechoslovakia (Ladislav Tondl) and Poland (praxiology) and, indeed, all over the world. Bunge's view in general is that engineering (or technology more broadly) is applied science; even when he laments the failures of "exact" philosophers to produce an adequate approach to biotechnology he says that such work as has been done is simply an application of the biochemistry and physiology of disease organisms to medicine as an "engineering" application. 1.2 But even Bunge himself recognizes the narrowness of this approach if pushed too far, and he relates it to systems theory -- even the General Systems Theory of Ludwig van Bertalanffy -- to make sure that the approach covers the full breadth of values and other aspects of engineering, including its democratic political control. Systems engineering is closely related to this broader aspect of Bunge's approach, and it too has a following throughout the world -- not least in the approach of the German philosopher Gunther Ropohl. A number of Dutch philosophers of technology, including at the University of Delft, provide formal, analytical approaches to technology that can easily be linked to this broader neo-Bungean systematic approach. 1.3 There are even further variations on the theme. American philosopher Joseph Pitt emphasizes the reverse direction, of the influence of technological instruments on developments in science, and the Spanish follower of Quintanilla, Ana Cuevas Badallo, directly challenges Bunge by emphasizing the central role of the so-called "engineering sciences" in technology -- as does the American philosopher of science, Ronald Laymon, following a totally different philosophical path.
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1.4 Then there are two American engineers-turned philosophers -- Billy Koen (mentioned earlier) and Samuel Florman -- who emphasize other aspects of engineering. Koen downplays the role of applied science, relegating it to one of the "state of the art" influences on engineering heuristics, which he takes to be central to a philosophical approach to engineering. 1.5 Florman emphasizes the teamwork of the whole range of engineers often involved in massive projects (he likens it to the intricacy of staging an opera), and he explicitly opens the door to governmental regulation when engineers' self-regulation breaks down. So much for the inside of the diamond. Few engineers quibble with these philosophical characterizations. The "external facets," so to speak, are more controversial.
2. VALUES AND ENGINEERING 2. Usually thought to be the polar opposites of those who emphasize the scientific aspects of engineering and technology are philosophers I lump under the perhaps unfortunate heading of metaphysical critics. 2.1 For example, American philosopher Carl Mitcham explicitly opposes "humanities philosophy of technology" to what he calls "engineering philosophy of technology," saying that the former must "take the measure of technological culture as a whole" -- where he explicitly refers to the German existentialist philosopher of technology and technological culture, Martin Heidegger, as well as the more moderate American neo-Heideggerian philosopher Albert Borgmann. (On another other hand, it should be noted that Mitcham has also resurrected the thought of another German engineer-philosopher, Friedrich Dessauer, for whom metaphysics offers a positive near apotheosis of engineering as having a "transcendent moral value.") 2.2 Other metaphysically-inclined philosophical critics of technological culture (they rarely mention engineering in particular) include the American, Donald Verene -- a follower of the French technocritic Jacques Ellul (who calls his approach "sociological"), and . . . 2.3 . . . another American, Frederick Ferre, who does talk about some engineering practices, including biotechnology, which he would want to be limited by a "metaphysical organicism." 2.4 There are other opponents of a "scientific" approach to engineering and technology, such as another American, Don Ihde, for whom close phenomenological analyses of individual practices, including engineering in a variety of forms, is much better than the science-aping analytical philosophy so dominant in the USA and Britain. 2.5 Another is the well known American critic of Artificial Intelligence, Hubert Dreyfus, who also acknowledges debts to phenomenology in general and Heidegger in particular. (Neither Ihde nor Dreyfus should be thought of as hostile to engineering, but only to some exaggerations in its practices.)
Should engineers pay any attention to these philosophers? I would say that certainly the phenomenological approaches should not be ignored in philosophical discussions of engineering. And in my experience many engineers are religious people who should not leave values issues for "church on Sunday." 2.Addendum There is also a whole school of thought -- so-called Social Construction of Technology -- strong in the Netherlands (where it is not viewed as in any sense hostile to engineering), as well as Spain, Britain, and the USA, emphasizes the intertwining of engineering and technology with society in the actual practice of engineering within what is often called "technoscience." I do not think an engineer interested in philosophy can afford to ignore this group.
3. A PHILOSOPHY POSITIVE ABOUT ENGINEERING: AMERICAN PRAGMATISM 3.1 American Pragmatism, best represented in SPT by Larry Hickman's work on John Dewey, represents a philosophical approach to engineering and science that is simultaneously positive in its recommendation of their utility in technosocial problem solving, while also being critical of engineers' too easy incorporation within capitalism in the form of large science-for-profit corporations and large governmental laboratories, for example, in the USA and the European Community. 3.2 Another American Pragmatist, and former president of SPT, Paul Thompson, takes Dewey's thought in another direction, saying, for example, that philosophers should work constructively with bioengineers and other members of the biotechnology (including agricultural technology) communities, including government regulators, often themselves technically trained. 3.3 And one of the first presidents of SPT, the Canadian philosopher Alex Michalos, regards suggestions like that of Florman -- that engineers should regulate their own affairs until there is a breakdown that requires regulatory intervention -- with suspicion: both scientists and engineers ought to recognize, and shoulder, social responsibilities as an intrinsic part of their professional work. I am convinced of the high value of these sorts of approaches, as contributing a great deal to the philosophical understanding -- and, more important, the improvement -- of engineering practice.
4. EVEN RADICALS DESERVE A HEARING 4.1 Radical critics of technology, including engineering, such as another American, Langdon Winner, are rarely welcomed warmly within engineering circles -- though it should be noted that Winner teaches at Rensselaer Polytechnic, that bastion of engineering education. Winner's thesis, usually viewed as being radical, is that engineers and other technical personnel need to think
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about the (often anti-) democratic implications of their grand ventures. 4.2 Another radical critic of engineering, the American philosopher Steve Goldman, also teaches at a bastion of engineering education, Lehigh University. He describes his thesis as the "social captivity of engineering," and he maintains that engineers (and applied scientists in industry) are culturally blind when they buy into the notion of engineering as "scientific." They are thereby shielding themselves from the obvious, the social and managerial determination of what goes on in engineering and applied science, even to the point of determination what is good engineering knowledge: engineers rarely, he says, do what they know to be their best work, deferring instead to managers, to what the customer (or the market) will accept. (I have worked with many engineers who readily accept Goldman's analysis but see nothing wrong with the situation: that's the world we live in, and we have to accept it.) 4.3 Explicitly radical is the American philosopher Andrew Feenberg (strongly influenced by the neo-Marxist German philosopher Herbert Marcuse). But where the Frankfurt School was highly critical of engineering, Feenberg sees possibilities of reform within managerial circles, if both workers and managers (often engineers) can be persuaded of the advantages of more equitable -- and environment-friendly -- arrangements within technoscientific corporations and the governments they serve. Should engineers pay any attention to these radical critics? What I would say is that an honest engineer, if one wants to be genuinely philosophical about his or her work, cannot ignore radical critiques. At the very least, their views should be taken as warnings about extreme excesses or extreme failures on the part of not only individual engineers but also engineering organizations and the other organizations within which engineers typically work.
5. ENGINEERING AS A GUILD AND ENGINEERING EDUCATION I had originally planned to talk about engineering as a guild -- especially in terms of professional self-regulation -- and engineering education: all too often lacking in education about philosophy (even ethics) and other humanities approaches that might provide young engineers with broader perspectives. But I don't have time.
6. REFERENCES [1] Borgmann, Albert. Technology and the Character of
Contemporary Life. Chicago, 1984. [2] Bunge, Mario. Treatise on Basic Philosophy, VII,
III, Part II. Reidel, 1985. [3] Cuevas Badallo, Ana. "A Model-Based Approach to
Technological Theories." Techne 9:2, 2005.
[4] Dessauer, Friedrich. Philosophie der Technik.Cohen, 1927.
[5] Dewey, John. The Quest for Certainty. Minton,Balch, 1929.
[6] Dreyfus, Hubert. What Computers Still Can’tDo. MIT, 1992.
[7] Durbin, Paul. Critical Perspectives on Nonacademic Science and Engineering. Lehigh, 1991.
[8] Durbin, Paul. "Philosophy of Technology: In Search of Discourse Synthesis." Techne 10:2, 2007.
[9] Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. Knopf, 1964.
[10] Feenberg, Andrew. Critical Theory of Technology. Oxford, 1991.
[11] Ferre, Frederick. Philosophy of Technology. Prentice-Hall, 1988.
[12] Florman, Samuel. The Existential Pleasures of Engineering. St. Martin's, 1976.
[13] Goldman, Steve. "The History of Engineering Education." National Technical Information
[14] Service, 1987. [15] Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning
Technology and Other Essays. Harper & Row, 1977. [16] Hickman, Larry. Philosophical Tools for
Technological Culture. Indiana, 2001. [17] Ihde, Don. Philosophy of Technology. Paragon
House, 1993. [18] Koen, Billy Vaughn. Definition of the Engineering
Method. American Society of Engineering Education, 1985.
[19] Laymon, Ronald. "Idealizations and the Reliability of Dimensional Analysis." In Durbin,Critical Perspectives (above.).
[20] Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man.Beacon, 1964.
[21] Michalos, Alex. "Philosophy of Science: Historical, Social, and Value Aspects." In P. Durbin, ed., A Guide to the Culture of Science, Technology, and Medicine. Free Press, 1984.
[22] Mitcham, Carl. Thinking through Technology. Chicago, 1994.
[23] Pitt, Joseph. Thinking about Technology. Seven Bridges, 2000.
[24] Quintanilla, Miguel Angel. Tecnologia: Un Enfoque Filosofico. Fundesco, 1989.
[25] Rapp, Friedrich. "The Material and Cultural Aspects of Technology." Techne 4:1, 1997.
[26] Ropohl, Gunther. "Philosophy of Socio-Technical Systems." Techne 4:1, 1997.
[27] Thompson, Paul. Food Biotechnology in Ethical Perspective. Chapman and Hall, 1997
[28] Tondl, Ladislav. "Information and Systems Dimensions of Technological Artifacts." Techne 4:1, 1997. van Bertalanffy, Ludwig. General Systems Theory. Braziller, 1973.
[29] Winner, Langdon. The Whale and the Reactor. Chicago, 1986.
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Distinguishing Architects from Engineers: A Pilot Study in Differences between Engineers and other Technologists
Michael Davis Illinois Institute of Technology
3301 S. Dearborn St.—SH 205 Chicago, IL 60615 01-312-567-3017
ABSTRACT This talk does three things: 1) point out a large
number of differences between engineers and architects; 2) provide an historical account of the origins of those differences; and 3) reflect on the method that makes the differences so clear and alternative methods of study that might make them appear much less distinct. I conclude that we must be careful to identify what method we use to study engineering, since the choice of method is often also the choice of a conclusion (or, at least, the ruling out a many promising alternatives).
Among important differences between engineers and architects today are: 1) architects learn much less mathematics, physics, and chemistry than engineers do; 2) architects are taught through “studio”; engineers through “classes”; 3) architects learn the history of architecture; engineers don’t learn history of architecture or engineering; 4) architects in their designs cultivate crafts, engineers tend to avoid them when they can; 5) architects take responsibility for beauty; engineers don’t (though engineers often produce beautiful objects); 6) architects emphasize lush visual presentation, not just blueprints, flow charts, and the like abstract representations; 7) architect tend to present themselves as artist, while engineers engineer tend to present themselves as scientists or inventors; 8) architecture has been, and remains, a art of peace, while engineering long connection with war; and 7) architects have different professional associations, code of ethics, etc. than engineers do.
The explanation of these differences is not to be found in the function of architects and engineers (the social purposes they serve, such as “building” or “invention”). Historically, the functions of architects have overlapped a good deal with civil engineers. Nor is the explanation that the disciplines developed in different places (something that does, in large part, explain the differences between cricket and baseball). Architecture and engineering (as we know them) grew up in the same places (Italy and France) at about the same time (1400-1800). What explains the differences is the history of their respective disciplines. This is a story of contingencies
ending in distinct curricula for training architects and engineers, resulting in a somewhat different set of skills and different institutional connections. I tell this story in some detail, connecting it with the separate development of architecture and engineering as occupations in the 19th century and as professions in the 20th.
I conclude that an emphasis on the “function” of engineers as “technologists” misses what is distinctive about engineering, both about what engineers in particular do (and don’t do) and about how and why they do it. Function is a largely a-historical category but the discipline, occupation, and profession of engineering are historical individuals—individuals that cannot be understood apart from the contingencies of that history. Engineering is what engineers, and others, have made it, though not so arbitrary a thing as the term “social construction” may suggest.
Keywords Engineer, architect, function, discipline. history
REFERENCES [1] Cuff, D. 1991 Architecture: The Story of Practice,
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1991 [2] Kostof, S. 2000 The Architect: Chapters in the History of
the Profession, University of California Press. [3] Vasari, G. 1963 The Lives of the painters, Sculptors, and
Architects, Everyman’s Library. [4] Vincenti, W. 1990 What Engineers Know and How They
Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical History, Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Software Engineering and the Problem of Vagueness Marco Fahmi
University of Otago PO Box 56
Dunedin, New Zealand (+64) 210645284
1. INTRODUCTION Software engineering is the area of computer science concerned with the theory, design, analysis and implementation of information-processing algorithms [1]. As such, it is a well established engineering discipline whose philosophical underpinnings ought to be examined closely.
I will be mainly concerned, in this paper, with the question of whether it is necessary for the software engineer to take a stand on open philosophical questions when designing software applications.
In the first part of the paper, I try show how software engineers routinely settle philosophical questions when designing software. I illustrate this by looking at how software engineers typically deal with the well-known philosophical problem of vagueness.
In the second part of the paper, I claim that it is not necessary for the software engineer to settle open philosophical questions. I argue that software engineers can (and should) offer engineering solutions that are agnostic about the current state of the philosophical debate.
2. SOFTWARE ENGINEERING AND THE SETTLING OF OPEN QUESTIONS Quine famously defended the “no first philosophy” view [2]: that philosophy ought not to be the tribunal where open empirical questions are to be settled. He argues that neither philosophy nor science are privileged arbiters to such settle issues. Rather, they are part of a continuum where one discipline has to defer sometimes to the other according to where the expertise lies.
One may plausibly embrace a similar view in engineering given that there is no clear line demarcating science from engineering, or engineering from philosophy. Consequently, neither philosophy nor engineering ought to be somehow privileged in arbitrating unsettled issues in those domains.
This principle, however, is often disregarded by software engineers who usually tend to design, implement or use software applications on pragmatic grounds (i.e. because they get the job done), and without regard to their philosophical dimensions.
One may even come to believe that it is inevitable for software engineers to settle questions that are still open and subject to sustained debate in philosophy. Part of the reason for this is sociological: software engineers traditionally disregarded what is going on in philosophy.
But another important part of the reason can be attributed, I believe, to the straight-forward unawareness of software engineers that their design decisions have philosophical dimensions. I will try to illustrate how this occurs via a simple example.
3. THE PROBLEM OF STORING VAGUE DATA Suppose that a software engineer is interested in designing a database that stores information about individuals. The database will store information about, say, a person’s name, gender and whether they are tall or not.
Typically, the software engineer will proceed by storing the name as a string of characters, gender as a Boolean variable and tallness also as a Boolean variable. This design decision, however, overlooks an important philosophical question concerning “tallness”: being tall (unlike being male or female) is a vague predicate.
By vague predicate, I mean that tallness admit borderline cases. While it is, sometimes, clear whether a person is tall or not, often this is not clear at all. In contrast, there are no borderline cases about gender. It is (almost) always definite whether a person is male or female.
It seems, therefore, that treating gender and tallness using the same engineering tools is a naïve design decision. For, two important problems arise with storing tallness as a Boolean value: first, it passes the problem of vagueness on to the users of the database. And they, in turn, have to decide (without any guidance) whether a person is tall or not.
Second, it settles the issue of how vagueness ought to be understood in ways that are, perhaps, not intended by the software engineer: by storing tallness as a Boolean value, the software designer implicitly assumes that there is always a matter of fact about every person’s tallness. This assumption, it turns out, is a highly contestable one in philosophy.
To understand the problem in its wider context, let us look at some of the philosophical approaches to vagueness.
4. THE PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEM OF VAGUENESS As I mentioned above, some predicates, such as “tall”, afford borderline cases where it is not clear, in certain situations, whether a person is tall or not and there are many philosophical interpretations of the question of vagueness with no obvious consensus view [3].
Epistemicists claim that there is always a matter of fact answer to whether a person is tall or not. And sometimes the difficulty is, precisely, epistemic: if we lined up all individuals according to their height, we do not know where to draw the line between tall and non-tall people.
Others blame the problem of vagueness on the use of bivalent logic. Supervaluationists argue that, in some cases, it is not definite whether a person is tall or not. Consequently, we ought to use a kind of logic that can handle such cases. Subvaluationists use a somewhat similar reasoning to advocate
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a logic where, in certain cases, a person can be both tall and not tall.
Another group of philosophers claim that the problem of vagueness can be resolved by a degree of belief (or degree of truth) approach. Belief that a person is true (or the matter of fact that the person is true) will come in degrees. In some cases, it is only partially believed (or partially true) that the person is tall.
Yet another group believes that vagueness is contextual and is only problematic when the predicate is considered outside of the appropriate context. Someone is tall (or not) only within the context of a ordering of tall people.
5. SETTLING WHAT VAGUNESS IS IN SOFTWARE ENGINEERING Looking back at our earlier database example, it is clear that the software designer who chooses to store tallness as a Boolean value sides with the epistemicist camp. Yet, there is no particular reason why this view ought to be preferred over others. Chances are, the choice was made unwittingly.
Indeed, one can easily imagine alternate database designs that correspond to the other views of vagueness described above. If one sympathizes with the super-/subvaluationist approach, for example, then tallness should be stored as a pair of Booleans (one for definitelyTall and another for definintelyNotTall).
If the degree-theoretic approach is selected, then tallness should be stored as a real. The real would reflect the partial belief in the truth of (or the partial truth of) the statement that some individual is tall.
Finally, if the contextual approach ought to be taken seriously, then the tallness variable should point to the array of other individuals’ data stored in the database that the individual in question is being compared to. And so on.
One observation from this is that software engineering does not, in fact, privilege any particular answer to the question of what vagueness is. This is, happily, compatible with Quine’s “no first philosophy” motto as I understanding applied to engineering.
But is it inevitable that any software application that stores vague predicates will have to settle the issue one way or another?
6. AN AGNOSTIC SOFTWARE ENGINEERING APPROACH I argue that settling the question of what vagueness is and, more generally, that the settling of open philosophical questions is not inevitable in software engineering. Indeed, I believe that a kind of agnosticism about those issues should guide software engineers and their methodology.
I can think of at least two possible ways to guarantee an agnostic software engineering approach to vagueness. The first
is pluralism: perhaps the vague predicate can be simultaneously stored in a variety of formats that correspond to every philosophical interpretations of vagueness.
But the problem with this approach, of course, is practicality. Multiplying the ways of storing a single value in a software system is not only unsavory to the pragmatically-minded software engineer, but also increases the probability of error and oversight. Sound software engineering principles advise against storing duplicate data beyond necessity.
A second way to guarantee agnosticism is to opt for a “polymorphic” approach: a generic data type that transforms into a single Boolean type, a pair of Booleans, a real, a pointer, etc. depending on what interpretation of vagueness the user of the database adopts.
So if the application operates in an environment where vagueness is handled using, say, fuzzy logic, then the returned value will be changed “on the fly” to a real value. Similarly, if the environment handles vagueness via supervaluation then the database would return a pair of Booleans, and so on.
In other words, the returned values are a reflection of what the interpretation of vagueness is in a particular environment, rather than an accurate representation of what vagueness truly is. This, I believe, is an appealing way to deal with vagueness that does not prejudice the issue against any philosophical view.
7. CONCLUSION I have argued that, in accordance with Quine’s “no first philosophy” principle, software engineering, as a discipline, needs to be more aware of the philosophical problems that software design and implementation overlap with.
And while software engineers routinely settle open philosophical questions in designing and implementing software application, this needs not be the case. I believe that it is possible to develop a software engineering approach that is agnostic about the answer to various philosophical issues.
The two key factors in success of this approach are: a concerted effort by software engineers to be more aware of the philosophical debate and the development of an appropriate software engineer methodology that does not require the commitment to any particular philosophical view.
8. REFERENCES [1] Loui, M.C. Computer science is an engineering discipline.
Engineering Education, 78 (3). 175-178. [2] Quine, W.V.O. Five milestones of empiricism. in Theories
and things, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1981.
[3] Sorensen, R. Vagueness. Zalta, E.N. ed. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Online, 2006.
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Bits don’t have error bars Russ Abbott
Department of Computer Science California State University
Los Angeles, Ca 01-310-621-3805
[email protected] ABSTRACT How engineering enabled abstraction—in computer science.
Categories and Subject Descriptors K.0 [Computing Milieux]: Philosophy of computer science.
General Terms (none)
Keywords Abstraction, emergence, level of abstraction, philosophy of computer science, philosophy of engineering, philosophy of science, reductionism.
1. INTRODUCTION In 1944, Erwin Schrödinger [4] pondered the nature of life.
[L]iving matter, while not eluding the ‘laws of physics’ … is likely to involve ‘other laws,’ [which] will form just as integral a part of [its] science.
But if biology is not just physics what else is there? Schrödinger’s question is a special case of the more general question: can there be independent higher-level laws of nature if everything is reducible to the fundamental laws of physics? The computer science notion of level of abstraction explains why there can—illustrating how computational thinking [6] can resolve one of philosophy’s most vexing problems. (Section 4 explains the essence of the solution.) This paper explores why the solution came from computer science rather than from engineering.
2. TURNING DREAMS INTO REALITY As engineers and computer scientists we create new worlds. A poetic—if overused—way to put this is to say that we turn our dreams into reality. We transform ideas—which exist only as subjective experience—into phenomena of the material world. In raising the issue of the relationship between mind and the physical world I am not claiming to explain consciousness. But I am taking mind as a given and claiming that the relationship between ideas and physical reality is at the heart of the difference between engineering and computer science. Both disciplines begin with ideas. Computer science turns ideas into a symbolic reality; engineering turns ideas into a material reality. Although perhaps unremarkably true, the consequences are far-reaching.
3. ENGINERING & COMPUTER SCIENCE Intellectual leverage. Computer science gains intellectual leverage by building levels of abstraction, the implementation of new types and operations in terms of existing types and operations. A level of abstraction is always operationally reducible to a pre-existing substrate, but it is characterized
independently—what Searle calls causal but not ontological reducibility.1 Levels of abstraction allow computer scientists to create new worlds which are both symbolic and real and which obey laws that are independent of their substrate platforms. Engineering gains intellectual leverage through mathematical modeling and functional decomposition. Both are understood to approximate an underlying reality. Neither is understood to create ontologically independent entities. The National Academy of Engineering [3] explains that “engineering systems often fail … because of [unanticipated interactions (such as acoustic resonance) among well designed components] that could not be identified in isolation from the operation of the full systems.” A further illustration of the relative difficulty engineering has with ontologically independent constructs is that engineering designs are buttressed by safety factors; software, in contrast, uses assertions. Every physical implementation of a level of abstraction does indeed have feasibility conditions. Safety factors should be understood as ways to ensure that those feasibility conditions are met rather than as an insurance policy against improbable events.
Symbolic floor vs. no floor. Engineering enabled computer science when it harnessed electrical signals as bits. Bits are both symbolic—no error bars—and physically real. Computer science builds levels of abstraction on a foundation of bits. It relies on engineering for issues beyond the bit—such as performance. But bits prevent computer science from working with the full richness of nature. Every software model has a fixed bottom level—making it impossible to explore phenomena that require dynamically varying lower levels. A good example is a biological arms race. Imagine a plant growing bark to protect itself from an insect. The insect may then develop a way to bore through bark. The plant may develop a toxin—for which the insect develops an anti-toxin. There are no software models in which evolutionary creativity of this richness occurs. To build software models of such phenomena would require that the model’s bottom level include all potentially relevant phenomena. But to do so is far beyond our currently available computational means. Engineering (like science) has no floor. It is both cursed and blessed by its attachment to physicality. It is cursed because one can never be sure of the ground on which one stands—raw nature does not provide a stable base. It is blessed because one can decide for each issue how deeply to dig for useable bedrock.
1 In Mind [5] Searle claims that this nicely described
distinction explains subjective experience. He doesn’t say how.
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Thought externalization. Engineers and computer scientists turn ideas into reality. (Scientists turn reality into ideas.2) The first step in turning ideas into reality is to externalize thought—not just to act on a thought but to represent the thought outside subjective experience in a form that allows it to be examined and explored. An enduring goal of computer science is to develop languages that have two important properties. (a) The language may be used to externalize thought. (b) Expressions in the language can act in the material world—that is, the language is executable. This is remarkably different from anything that has come before. Human beings have always used language to externalize thought. But to have an effect in the world, language has always depended on people. Words mean nothing unless someone understands them. Software acts without human intervention. (See [2].) Engineers externalize thought as either designs or objects. Most designs—even computer-based designs—have the same limitation as most other languages. To affect the world a person must understand them. The engineer who builds an object has indeed turned thought into a material phenomenon. But the thought is gone; all that’s left is the physical realization. To recover the thought requires reverse engineering—i.e., science. In computer science externalized thought is executable; in engineering it isn’t.
4. THE REDUCTIONIST BLIND SPOT Here’s how levels of abstraction resolve the issue of higher-level laws. (See [1].) In the Game of Life, the rules are analogous to the fundamental laws of physics: they determine everything that happens on a Game of Life grid. Nevertheless there can be higher level laws that are not derivable from them. Certain Game of Life configurations produce patterns. One can implement arbitrary Turing machines by arranging such patterns. Computability theory applies to these Turing machines. Thus while not eluding the Game of Life rules, new laws (computability theory) that are independent of the Game of Life rules apply at the Turing machine level of abstraction—just as Schrödinger said. Furthermore, because the halting problem is undecidable, it is undecidable whether an arbitrary Game of Life configuration will reach a stable state. So, not only are there independent higher level laws, those laws apply to the fundamental elements of the Game of Life. I call this downward entailment, a scientifically acceptable alternative to downward causation. Like all levels of abstraction, Game of Life patterns are epiphenomenal—they have no causal power. It is the Game of Life rules that turn the causal crank. Why not reduce away these epiphenomena? Reducing away a level of abstraction results in a reductionist blind spot. No equations over the Game of Life grid can describe the computations performed by a Turing machine—unless the equations themselves model a Turing machine.
2 Humanists turn reality into dreams. —Debora Shuger Mathematicians turn coffee into theorems. —Paul Erdos
It isn’t surprising that levels of abstractions give rise to new laws. To implement a level of abstraction is to impose constraints. (It is their entropy and mass properties, not causality, that make levels of abstraction ontologically irreducible, i.e., objectively real.) A constrained system almost always obeys laws that wouldn’t hold otherwise. Those laws make sense only when expressed in terms of the abstractions implemented by the constraints. This perspective applies beyond software. Nature—a “blind programmer”—also builds levels of abstraction, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as emergence. The principle of emergence helps explain what exists. Extant levels of abstraction—naturally occurring or man-made, static (at equilibrium) or dynamic (far from equilibrium)—are those whose implementations have materialized and whose environments support their persistence. Since it is the elementary forces that enable implementations to form and cohere, a fundamental mystery remains. What are forces, and how do they work? It will probably require the development of a background-free physics to answer this question.
5. SUMMARY Engineering has no stable base. Engineers must always be concerned about the possibility of lower level physical effects—such as O-rings not functioning as sealants if the temperature is too low. Consequently, engineering has not been in an intellectual position to develop the notion of level-of-abstraction. But with its gift of the bit to computer science, engineering created a world that is both real and symbolic. Computer science developed the level-of-abstraction as a way to gain intellectual leverage over that world. It then applied that concept to solve a long-standing problem in the philosophy of science.
6. REFERENCES [1] Abbott, Russ, “Emergence explained,” Complexity,
Sep/Oct, 2006, (12, 1) 13-26. [2] Abbott, Russ, “If a tree casts a shadow is it telling the
time?” Journal of Unconventional Computation, to appear. [3] Commission on Engineering and Technical Systems,
National Academy of Engineering, Design in the New Millennium, National Academy Press, 2000.
[4] Schrödinger, Erwin, What is Life?, Cambridge University Press, 1944.
[5] Searle, John, Mind: a brief introduction, Oxford University Press, 2004.
[6] Wing, Jeanette, “Computational Thinking,” Communications of the ACM, March 2006, (49, 3) 33-3
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Architecting Engineering Systems: Craft or Science?
Joel Moses Institute Professor
Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Systems MIT
Cambridge, MA 02139 USA [email protected]
Keywords Philosophy and engineering, systems engineering, software engineering, systems architecture, design methodologies, organizational structures 1. Introduction This talk deals with several related questions that have bothered me for decades. One, why is engineering highly respected in some countries (e.g., Germany, Japan) and far less so in others (e.g., England)? Second, why have I been unhappy with popular approaches to Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, and the organization of firms? The popular approaches have tended to rely on hierarchical tree structured architectures. I, on the other hand, tend to emphasize other forms of hierarchies as system architectures. Third, why have I not been comfortable with the notion, popular among some academic engineers in the US, that engineering design is close to becoming a science or an artificial science as Herb Simon uses the term? My career at MIT has not emphasized the design of physical systems. Rather, it has involved large scale software development and the management of academic engineering departments. I have encountered what I think of as methodologies for organization and design of systems in each phase of my career. I first encountered Herb Simon’s top-down tree-structured methodology in AI in the 60’s. I rebelled against this approach which relied on logic and searching tree structures. I created the Knowledge Based Systems approach in AI and shortly thereafter switched to computer science. There I encountered a similar approach to software engineering while developing the Macsyma system for computer algebra[2], so I switched again and became an academic administrator. Lo and behold, I read the literature on organizational structures and there was Herb Simon again with essentially the same top-down approach. It was in the 80’s when I read Ouchi’s Theory Z[3] that a light bulb went on. Ouchi was writing about how Japanese manufacturing firms differed from American ones. His critique of American organizational approaches was similar to my critiques of classic AI and software engineering. I increasingly felt that a key reason why Americans were comfortable with top-down approaches was their culture and the system philosophies that underly that culture. My latest surprise was that Americans increasingly understood the weakness in top-down approaches in the 90’s, but rather than adapt the methodology I espoused, went to an alternative methodology, which I call here bottom-up. Bottom-up gets around a key weakness in top-down approaches, namely inflexibility, and is close to Darwinian approaches to design. I ascribe this move too to cultural proclivities.
2. System Architectures, Cultures and Philosophy There is no question that engineering science has been both a popular and successful movement since World War II. This is certainly true the closer one gets to issues that are scientific in nature, such as in integrated circuit processing, but is it true for issues, such as large scale design, that are closer to decision making and organizational structure? Herb Simon believed so, given the title of one of his chapters in The Sciences of the Artificial[5], “The Science of Design.” My view is that architecting large scale engineering systems, a key part of design, is largely a craft and not a science nor an engineering science or an artificial science. Nor are design technologies, such as Computer Aided Design systems, sufficiently powerful for this architectural task. I do not believe that architecting of large scale systems will soon become a science given the increasing complexity and relatively rapid changes of such systems. Thus I believe that engineering should be viewed as a mix of craft, technology and science. Countries, such as Germany and Japan, where the national culture has a relatively positive view of craft as well as science, tend to value engineering highly. England does not have such a high opinion of craft or of engineering. In fact, in England an engineer is often an operator of an engine. The US attitude toward craft and engineering is somewhere between those of England and Germany. The Dutch anthropologist, Geert Hofstede, has written about similar distinctions among IBM employees in various countries in Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind[1]. Where does philosophy fit in such a discussion? I like to contrast Aristotle and Plato in this regard, although neither can be considered to be an engineer. Aristotle was interested in science, especially physics and biology. He was also interested in artificial sciences, to use Herb Simon’s term, in particular political science. In each such field he tended to rely on a particular generic form of system architecture, namely top-down tree structured hierarchies. Simon was also interested in many fields, such as political science, economics, management science, cognitive science, engineering design and artificial intelligence. In each of these fields he also tended to rely on top-down tree structured hierarchies. Plato was Aristotle’s teacher, but had rather different background and views. Plato’s family was part of the Greek aristocracy, whereas Aristotle’s family was in the middle class (his father was a doctor). Plato tended to view systems holistically, whereas Aristotle tended to be a reductionist. Plato’s favorite structure in The Republic [4]was a layered hierarchy with three layers. Note that craft-based firms rely on a three-layer architecture with masters, journeymen and apprentices. In the US large partnerships, such as large law firms, also have such a structure. Plato’s approach to abstractions was different from Aristotle’s, which emphasized
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logic. Aristotle’s approach to analyses via logic leads to a top-down tree structured set of substatements. The Aristotlelian approach creates vertical cuts in a space, whereas the Platonic approach relies on horizontal cuts and emphasizes cooperation within layers. Plato would have been surprised to have me consider him to be craft-oriented and relatively close to an engineering system architect, but good system architects in my experience tend to be holistic, abstract, and highly experienced. The West followed Plato’s ideas for a millennium (note that the organizational structure of the Catholic Church is a layered hierarchy). It followed Aristotle’s ideas in recent centuries. Germany, which was not united until 1870, has a better memory of and respect for Platonic ideas, craft and engineering than England, which has been united for many more centuries. Japan did not become a modern nation state until 1868, with the Meiji restoration, and thus its memory of structural ideas related to craft is quite strong. I call the architectural approach that is based on layered hierarchies the middle-out approach.
3.Three Architectures Neither the Platonic nor the Aristotelian approaches are ideal under all circumstances. Lately a bottom-up design approach based on network architectures and modern biology has become popular. It too is not ideal under all circumstances. I believe that a key parameter in deciding which approach to emphasize in architecting engineering systems is to consider the rate of change in the system’s environment. Future engineering systems could benefit from a mix of these approaches that best fits the environment in which these systems operate. A summary of three design methodologies and their properties and relationships is as follows:
1) Top-down tree structured hierarchies: general method, logical, reductionistic, related to Aristotelian thought, quite inflexible, useful in small to large systems in environments with low rates of change
2) Bottom-up network-related: general, related to Darwinian thought, highly flexible, may be hard to control, can be quite inefficient, useful in very large systems and in environments with high rates of change
3) Middle-out layered hierarchies: less general,
abstract, holistic, related to Platonic thought, flexible, somewhat inefficient, useful in medium-sized systems in environments with medium rates of change
4. Educating System Architects How does one teach architecting of engineering systems as a craft? The goal is to produce a master architect in less than the 20 years of experience that is usually claimed to be needed for such a person. At MIT we have attempted to educate midcareer engineers (average age 35) to become system architects in our System Design and Management program. SDM is a masters program offered jointly by MIT’s engineering school and the Sloan School of Management. I cannot say that we have been fully successful in this endeavor thus far, partly due to confusion of our goals with those of systems engineering. In fact, the issues addressed in this talk may be critical to our eventual success in SDM.
References [1] Hofstede, G and G J Hofstede, 2005 Cultures and
Organizations: Software of the Mind, 2nd ed., McGraw-Hill [2] Moses, J. 1974 MACSYMA: The Fifth Year, ACM
SIGSAM Bulletin, Volume 8 , Number 3 Pages: 105 - 110
[3] Ouchi, W.G. 1981 Theory Z: How American Business Can Meet the Japanese Challenge, Avon Books
[4] Plato, The Republic 1991 tr. Bloom, A, 2nd ed., Basic Books
[5] Simon, H.A. 1985 The Sciences of the Artificial, 2nd ed., MIT Press
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Are Technologies Inherently Normative?Hans Radder
Faculty of Philosophy VU University Amsterdam
De Boelelaan 1105 1081 HV Amsterdam
The Netherlands [email protected]
ABSTRACT Answering the question posed in my title requires, first of all, a plausible account of the notions of ‘technology’ and ‘normativity’. For this purpose, a (type of) technology is characterized as a (type of) artefactual, functional system with a certain degree of stability and reproducibility, and the question of how we may successfully realize such technologies is discussed. Next, a norm is taken to be a socially embedded directive about what people should do or believe, and several important aspects of norms and the role they play in actual practices are explained.
The second step is an examination of the normativity of technology in the case of Langdon Winner’s account of the political nature of artefacts and in my own analysis of the material/social control needed to realize stable and reproducible technologies. The merits and problems of these approaches are assessed and their implications for the main question of this paper discussed. I conclude that the answer is ‘yes’, technologies are inherently normative, and I explain what this means and why it is the case.
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The intertwining of ethics and methodology in science and engineering: a virtue-ethical approach
L. Consoli
Department of Philosophy and Science Studies Institute for Science, Innovation, and Society
Faculty of Science, Radboud University Nijmegen Toernooiveld 1, 6525 ED Nijmegen
The Netherlands [email protected]
Keywords Virtue ethics, ethical codes, McIntyre, scientific misconduct
The ethics of science and engineering has become in the last years a hot topic not only on the agendas of academic institutions and funding agencies, but also among scientists and engineers themselves and, last but not least, among the general public: one could say that issues relating to proper or improper behaviour have become globalised and some of these cases (high profile cases such as the Hwang affaire or the case involving physicist Jan-Hendrik Schön) became highly visible events for a global public. Notably the case of Woo-Suk Hwang, a prominent South-Korean stem-cell researcher who was accused (and found guilty) first of coercing female assistants to donate eggs for research and, later, to have fabricated a series of breakthroughs in cloning techniques became a global and public affaire. The first step academic institutions usually take in dealing with these and other instances of misconduct is to establish ad hoc committees, usually composed of distinguished scientists, to analyse the nature of the allegations and come to a conclusion regarding whether misconduct took place. We analysed one such report in [1], pointing out, among others,that the problem not only concerns the the ethical soundness of this one particular case, but also that more fundamental issues concerning proper scientific methodology as well as science ethics are at stake . Traditionally, questions of methodology and ethics have been treated more or less as separate issues or, as being related but fundamentally different (for example, the idea of the neutrality of science is based on the assumption that ethical judgements are not a part of what it means to do proper research), while our analysis pointed out that scientists tended implicitly to see ethics as the underpinning of their methodology. While we must be careful to distinguish the different ways in which ethics come into play (the desire to “to do justice to Nature” on one side and ethical calls related to application of scientific knowledge on the other side), we contend that this implies that methodological and ethical normativity are linked in a very fundamental way. Together, they can be seen as constitutive of the scientific process [3]. We will argue in this contribution that this view of the relationship between method and ethics deserves to be adressed more explicitly and can form the basis of a new approach towards ethical issues in science and engineering. In particular, we will
try to show that a virtue-ethical approach, on the basis of which the figure of the "good practitioner" can be defined, has many theoretical and practical advantages. As an example, we will consider the issue of the function and utility of ethical codes of conduct. Ethical codes are nowadays widespread, most institutions and associations of professionals and practitioners have issued their own ethical code (as a symptom of professionalisation). These codes are supposed to fulfill a double function: they can be seen on one side as the crystallisation of accepted practices in the field (descriptive function) and on the other side as pointing out where limits of acceptability end and misconduct begins (prescriptive function). Practice, though, shows that these codes are seldom known to practitioners and, if they are, are usually not internalised, i.e.: they do not seem to match with notions of proper behaviour as experienced by scientists and engineers themselves. This mismatch between the written codes and the unwritten codes of “conscience” can be clarified by referring to the MacIntyrian concepts of "institution" and "practice"[2]. As long as the ethical codes are top-down regulations of an institution, rather than the “living morality” of the virtuous community of scientific practice, they will remain of limited applicability. Combining our unified approach to ethics and method with a virtue-ethical framework can in our opinion contribute to understanding and strenthening the emergence of virtuous practices of science and engineering in an environment of global competition.
References [1] Consoli, L. Scientific misconduct and science ethics: a case study based approach, Science and Engineering Ethics 12 (3) (2006), 533-541.
[2] MacIntyre, A. After Virtue. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 1981, 2007.
[3] Zwart, H. Professional ethics and scholarly communication. In Michiel Kortals, Robert J. Bogers (eds.): Ethics for life scientists. Wageningen UR Frontis Series, Volume 5 Dordrecht: Springer, 2005.
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PRIORITISING PEOPLE - OUTLINE OF AN ASPIRATIONAL ENGINEERING ETHIC
Professor W Richard Bowen, FREng School of Engineering,
University of Wales Swansea, Singleton Park, Swansea, SA2 8PP,
UK1. [email protected]
1 Also at i-NewtonWales.
ABSTRACT One of the major challenges facing engineering is the development of an aspirational ethical foundation for our profession that redresses the present imbalanced prioritisation of technical ingenuity over helping people. The paper presents an analysis that seeks to provide a basis for such reprioritisation. Some practical outcomes are considered. Keywords Buber, business, engineering, ethics, Levinas, MacIntyre, medicine. 1. INTRODUCTION At its best, engineering changes the world for the benefit of humanity. However, the great technical successes of engineering and the enormous satisfaction that engineers can gain from the purely technical aspects of their work lead to a danger - that engineers forget that technical ingenuity in itself is not the goal of engineering. The unfortunate tendency to prioritise technical ingenuity over helping people has a pervasive presence in modern engineering. This tendency has two main types of undesirable outcome. Firstly, the development and application of complex but inappropriate technology. A very significant example is military equipment and weapons. The use of many of the weapons produced is in contravention of international conventions and treaties. Secondly, technology that could alleviate great human suffering is available but is not being applied as extensively or as rapidly as it could be. A critical example is that 1.1 billion people do not have safe drinking water, 2.4 billion people have no provision for sanitation, and as a result 6,000 people, mostly children under the age of five, die every day from water related diseases. There is an urgent need to redress this current imbalanced prioritisation in engineering. The present paper aims to contribute to such a reprioritisation by suggesting a conceptual framework that encourages engineers to reflect on how they can optimise the benefits of the application of their skills. 2. ETHICAL VIEWPOINTS Ethical analysis of engineering has been limited compared to that of other key professions. Where such analysis has been carried out, there has been a tendency for engineers to adopt consequentialism as a default position, due to its apparent
simplicity and quasi-empirical bias combined with an inadequate appreciation of its philosophical limitations. Contractualism has also been widely applied in engineering ethics. Some engineers would view this as a default justification of their activities: if some aspect of their work is not explicitly legally forbidden then it is regarded as acceptable. The widespread development of weapons that contravene international law shows that even this minimalist view is not adhered to. More generally, contractualism can be a justification for ethical mediocrity and acceptance of present minimum norms. An emphasis on duty, deriving in philosophical terms from Kant, has also played a significant role in the development of engineering ethics, especially as a background to the formulation of ethical codes. The respect for persons inherent in a duty approach has much to offer engineering ethics, but the often dense associated argumentation is a barrier to its more widespread adoption by engineers. Virtue based approaches have had less influence on engineering ethics. 3. LESSONS FROM MEDICAL AND BUSINESS ETHICS Engineering ethics can learn from the more advanced ethical development in medicine and business. Modern medical ethics differs in two striking ways from the generally adopted approaches to engineering ethics. Firstly, there is a great emphasis on the individual, the patient, affected by the doctor’s actions. Secondly, the doctor is emphatically personally accountable for decisions. A key feature of the difference between the work of doctors and engineers is proximity. Those affected by a doctor’s work are usually in his or her immediate proximity whereas those affected by an engineer’s work are frequently distant in both place and time. Insights from business ethics are also of great relevance to engineering, especially as engineers are frequently employed in commercial organisations. Two concerns that have become apparent in the study of business ethics need specific attention in the development of an effective approach to engineering ethics. Firstly, a tendency for employees to bracket their personal ethical values, a suppression of ethical responsibility that seems to be a feature of goal- and end- oriented work environments. Secondly, social science studies of cognitive moral development which suggest that employees often function at a level of minimally acceptable ethical behaviour rather than aspiring to the highest achievable levels.
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4. OUTLINE OF AN ASPIRATIONAL ENGINEERING ETHIC An aspirational engineering ethic needs to overcome the limitations of the traditional ethical views and to learn from the more advanced analysis of ethics in other professions. The present outline is based on two philosophical sources. Firstly, writings that lie somewhat outside what is conventionally regarded as the main stream of ethics, but which contain profound ethical insights that can provide an important balance to prevailing views. Secondly, recent writings that build on the philosophical main stream in especially imaginative and practical ways. Foremost among writings in the first category is Buber’s I and Thou [1], which is concerned with the way in which relation arises. Buber introduces a seminal vocabulary for describing our existence by using the “primary words” I-Thou and I-It. The world of I-It is the world of experiencing and using where a man or woman “works, negotiates, bears influence, undertakes, concurs, organises, conducts business, officiates…” In contrast, the world of I-Thou is the world of meeting nature and people, with the possibility of a relationship engendering care. Buber warns that vigilance is necessary in highly technological societies, for the development of experiencing and using comes about mostly through the decrease of man’s power to enter into relation. For engineers, Buber’s formulation has the unique advantages of encompassing both person/person and person/natural world (environmental) relations and of recognising the importance of technical knowledge. It vitally balances the priority presently given to rule and outcome approaches in engineering ethics. However, the nature of engineering requires an extension of I-Thou interactions in terms of I-You interactions, based on care but lacking personal intimacy. Levinas [2] provides an even stronger statement of the priority of the demands that others make on us, which he designates by the strikingly visual notion of the face. He describes an ethical act as, “a response to the being who in a face speaks to the subject and tolerates only a personal response.” In simple terms, we need to hear the voice of others saying, “It’s me here, please help me!” The directness of the approaches of both Buber and Levinas make them very appropriate starting points for the development of an aspirational engineering ethos. It is worth noting that Korsgaard [3] has reached a similar conclusion about the ethical priority of others based on a sophisticated Kantian-duty based analysis of a type that only the most ethically committed of engineers are likely to follow. Of works in the second category, MacIntyre’s After Virtue [4] provides key concepts for the development of an aspirational engineering ethic. Like Buber and Levinas, he argues that traditional approaches have placed too little emphasis on persons, and further that such approaches also placed too little emphasis on the contexts of their lives. The ability to give ethical priority to people is facilitated by cultivation of virtues, which may depend on context. This approach is promoted by consideration of the appropriate virtues in terms of a practice supported by institutions. Though he does not mention engineering, MacIntyre’s virtue based description of practices and institutions provides the starting point for a coherent description of engineering that can be readily recognised by professional engineers. The virtues (or principles) appropriate
to engineering may be categorised, for example, as: accuracy and rigour; honesty and integrity; respect for life, law and the public good; responsible leadership, listening and informing [5]. MacIntyre’s terminology also provides a very appropriate description of the outcomes of engineering activity. These are internal goods, including standards of technical excellence and the satisfaction arising from personal accomplishment, and external goods, including engineered artefacts and wealth. The description of engineered artefacts as goods allows such physical technological accomplishments to be distinguished from the end or goal of engineering activity, which is the promotion of human wellbeing. Further, the continuity and consistency of an ethical approach giving priority to other people may be promoted by an individual considering his or her life as a narrative unity. This helps an individual to aspire to ethical behaviour in both private and professional life in a balanced, consequence-sensitive manner. 5. PRACTICAL OUTCOMES As both engineering and ethics are practical, engineering ethics should be doubly expected to have practical outcomes. Important outcomes of the aspirational ethos outlined include: In education Recruitment of students and the overall tone of engineering courses should give greater emphasis to the goal of benefits in terms of the quality of life. Personal responsibility for the results of professional activities should be emphasised. Engineering institutions The professional codes of national engineering institutions should progressively incorporate increased degrees of compassion and generosity. The creation of an international engineering organisation to promote aspirational practice should be considered. Industry and work practices The more widespread adoption of aspirational codes of conduct in industry should to be promoted. Career development plans that bring employees into closer proximity with end-users for at least part of their working life should be encouraged. Positioning engineering in the public and intellectual mainstream The public should be engaged in positive debate about engineering priorities, as already occurs for medicine and business. The personal ethical responsibility of every engineer All engineers need to take a more active role in considering the ethical implications of their work. Our aspiration should be summarised: “Here I am, how can I help you?” 6. REFERENCES [1] Buber, M. I and Thou, Continuum, London, 2004. Originally published as Ich und Du, Shocken Verlag, Berlin, 1923. [2] Levinas, E. Totality and Infinity, Duquesne, Pittsburgh, 1969. Originally published as Totalité et Infini, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1961. [3] Korsgaard, C.M. The Sources of Normativity, CUP, Cambridge, 1996. [4] MacIntyre, A. After Virtue, Second edition, Gerald Duckworth, London, 1985. [5] Royal Academy of Engineering, Statement of Ethical Principles, revised 2007, http://www.raeng.org.uk/policy/ethics/pdf/Statement_of_Ethical_Principles.pdf
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Imagining worlds Responsible engineering under conditions of epistemic opacity
Mark Coeckelbergh Dept. of Philosophy, University of Twente
P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands
Keywords Responsibility, ethics, engineering, technology, imagination
1. TRANSPARENCY How must we understand the demand that engineering be morally responsible? In this paper, I distinguish between two approaches to responsibility. One ascribes moral responsibility to the self and to others under the following epistemic conditions, which we may summarize as transparency: Transparency of the relation between action and consequences. The link between action and consequences is clear, both from my point of view and from the point of view of others. First, I can, in principle, know and experience the consequences of my individual action, since there is no time and space gap between my action and the consequences of my action, and I can oversee the effects of my actions on others. Second, others can, in principle, monitor my action. In this context, individuals receive moral praise or blame from others, and traditional ethical systems such as the ten commandments develop. Corresponding moral systems are build on expectations of reciprocity, which can be tested in small, not too complex communities that are overseeable. Transparency of the relation between my action and what is not under my control. First, the actions of others are not under my control. But the distribution of action is clear. I can distinguish between what I did and what others did. From a social perspective: if actions are individual, or the individual contribution to collective actions are recognisable, responsibility is assigned on an individual basis. The distribution of action is clear. Although we may praise or blame several individuals, we know who does what, and we distribute responsibility accordingly. Second, there is transparency of the relation between my action and whatever else is not under my control, described in terms of luck, chance, contingency, natural causes, divine influence, etc. Again the distribution is clear. I know what I did. Either my action is completely mine, in which case my responsibility is absolute, or something happens which I cannot help, in which case no-one (including myself) should praise or blame me for it. Although these conditions are unlikely to apply in circumstances when questions regarding moral responsibility arise (and indeed may appear exotic in many other circumstances of human life), influential moral theories appear to assume them. This is not only regrettable for philosophy; it is a disaster if we want to understand responsibility in engineering practice, which takes place in the context of contemporary technological culture and society. Let me explain why.
2. OPACITY Much influential moral theory seems to take the first approach to moral responsibility, but this approach is inadequate in the context of contemporary society, technology and engineering. Between the actions of an engineer and the eventual consequences of her actions lies a complex world of relationships, people, things, time, and space. How adequate is the concept of individual action under these circumstances? Moreover, in a technological society it is hard to sharply distinguish between her contribution and those of others, and between her action and ‘accident’ or ‘luck’. The engineer’s moral condition, therefore, is a tragic one, in the sense that incomplete knowledge seems to prevent her from grasping her contribution to what goes on, and, therefore, to assign moral responsibility to herself and to others. This question can be generalised to other activities in a contemporary, technological context. We fail to know the consequences of what we do, and we do not know the distribution of action. How, then, can we still act responsibly?
3. IMAGINING WORLDS An alternative approach may assist us to answer this question. My proposal is not that we should try to achieve full transparency (which is impossible), or that we should get rid of traditional moral theory, but that we should arm our moral thinking to deal with the challenges poses by contemporary conditions. I argue that imagination can help researchers, engineers, and other stakeholders to reconstruct a world, imagine a history and a future, and imagine consequences for others in distant times and places. I refer to insights from the philosophy of technology (e.g. Jonas and Anders, but also contemporary work), and offer the example of reconstructing a world of offshore engineering to understand responsibility for a near-disaster.
4. CONCLUSION With regard to engineers, I conclude that imagination must be stimulated, also by technological means such as the Internet, but that such a project cannot suffice with educating engineers to be more imaginative. With regard to research, I recommend that engineering ethics should not be separated from sociology, philosophy of technology, business ethics, political philosophy, and other fields of inquiry. We need further transdisciplinary work that contributes to a better understanding of responsible engineering under conditions of epistemic opacity.
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Philosophy of Engineering in China Bocong Li
Department of Social Sciences Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
Beijing, China 100049 86-10-88256198
ABSTRACT This paper introduces the process of philosophy of engineering in China. Then it discussed some important issues of philosophy of engineering briefly, such as world 3 and world 4, scientific community and engineering community, and a fundamental thesis of philosophy of engineering, and so on.
Keywords Engineering, philosophy of engineering, world 4, engineering community, China
1. INTRODUCTION Whereas philosophy of science and philosophy of technology have both been well established as branches of philosophy, philosophy of engineering, if anything, is still in its early infancy, yet to be defined, recognized and legitimated. In the foreword of Critical Perspectives on Nonacademic Science and Engineering [1], which was published in 1991, Steven L. Goldman and Stephen H. Cutcliffe attested that philosophy of engineering had been a virtually nonexistent discipline till then.
At the beginning of the new millennium, however, it has become evidential that philosophy of engineering is emerging as a distinctive discipline of philosophical inquiry in the United States, Britain, Western Europe, as well as in China. In this essay I describe and discuss some remarkable developments of philosophy of engineering in China. Firstly, I survey the advance in the field of philosophy of engineering in China. Then, some important issues of philosophy of engineering are discussed briefly.
2. THE PROGRESS OF PHILOSOPHY OF ENGINEERING IN CHINA Though in the 1980’s and 1990’s there were a number of Chinese engineers and philosophers who began to pay attention to some philosophical issues in engineering, the term “philosophy of engineering” rarely appeared in Chinese philosophy literature. After writing an essay entitled “I-create-therefore-I-am” in 1994, in 2001 I wrote another essay entitled “From I-think-therefore-I-am to I-create-therefore-I-am”, published in the journal Philosophical Researches, in which distinctions between philosophy of engineering and epistemology were analyzed. An Introduction to Philosophy of Engineering [2] was published in the next year, which consists of eight chapters. In the book I analyzed and explained about fifty categories, such as: ends, end-directedness, initial conditions, restrained conditions, plans, decision-making, design, operations, rules, rule-following, institutions, interface between human and machine, micro-mode of production, rationality, life, use of artifacts, values, world 3 and world 4, the trinity of heaven, earth, and human being, and so on. I argued that science, technology, and engineering are three different kinds of human activity. In my opinion, science
should not be confused with technology, and technology should not be confused with engineering either. Whereas the essence of scientific activity is making new discoveries, and the essence of technological activity is inventing new artifacts, the essence of engineering activity is constructing or making artifacts. Of course, I did not mean to neglect the connections between science, technology, and engineering. Therefore we should distinguish not only philosophy of technology from philosophy of science, but also philosophy of engineering from philosophy of technology.
A notable feature of the development of philosophy of engineering in China is that it has involved practicing engineers ever since its beginning. A workshop on philosophy of engineering was held in June of 2004, attended by a number of academicians of the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE) as well as philosophers. Kuangdi Xu, the president of the CAE, also addressed at the workshop. This event is considered as a milestone in the history of philosophy of engineering in China. The First National Conference on Philosophy of Engineering was held in Beijing in December of 2004, and the Chinese Society for Philosophy of Engineering was established at that conference. The Second and the Third National Conference were held in Shanghai in September, 2005 and in Xi’an in July, 2007 respectively. These meetings were organized in cooperation with the CAE, taking place jointly with a forum on the frontiers of engineering run by the CAE. Another joint effort of Chinese philosophers and engineers is the publication of the book Philosophy of Engineering [3], which can serve both as a comprehensive introduction to philosophy of engineering for engineers and a textbook for university students.
In 2003, the Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences established the Research Center for Engineering and Society that is dedicated to interdisciplinary studies of engineering, which embraces studies in philosophy, sociology and history of engineering. The Research Center has edited and published yearbooks Engineering Studies [4] since 2004.
Some major philosophical topics introduced by Chinese philosophers and engineers include: the nature and role of engineering, engineering methodology, engineering thinking style, engineering knowledge, engineering rationality, decision-making in engineering, engineering designs, engineering ethics, engineering and sustainable development, engineering and globalization, engineering and culture, and so on. An intriguing question, especially to new comers to philosophy of engineering with a background on philosophy of technology, is about the demarcation between technology and engineering. To achieve a comprehension of the distinction between technology and engineering is typically a way towards understanding how richer and more promising a philosophy of engineering can be. We regard engineering as the integration of technological factors and non-technological factors which consist of social factors, economic factors, political factors, institutional factors, ethical factors, and so on. In some conditions non-technological
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factors are even more important than technological factors in engineering. So conceptually, engineering should not be simply taken as the application of technology.
In the latter half of this essay I shall discuss two issues briefly.
3. WORLD 3 AND WORLD 4 Karl Popper has established his theory of “three Worlds” which has a tremendous influence not only in Europe and America but also in China. The three Worlds refer to World 1, i.e. the physical world, World 2, i.e. the mental world, and World 3. Popper (1974) states: “I regard the third world as being essentially the product of the human mind. It is we who create third world objects”. From the point of view of engineering and philosophy of engineering, in addition to three worlds proposed by Popper, there is another world, World 4, which is parallel to World 3 but different from World 3. I want to imitate Popper to say: “I regard the fourth world as being essentially the product of the human body. It is we who create fourth world objects.” While World 3 comprises spiritual objects, World 4 comprises material objects. Although both World 1 and World 4 are material world, World 4 is qualitatively different from World 1. While World 1 is a natural one, World 4 is a new one created by humans. I would like to develop a new kind of realism, dubbed ‘engineering realism’, based on philosophy of engineering. While in the field of the traditional realm the focus is what reality is, in the field of the engineering realm the focus is how engineering reality is created and used by human beings and effects human beings and natural reality. According to Popper, World 2 refers to human mind, but according to the theory of four Worlds, World 2 refers to collectives or groups that consist of individuals who are the unity of mind and body. Because the phenotype of subjects in engineering activity is groups or collectives, issues of organizations and institutions become supremely important. So what Popper refers to by World 2 is radically different from what is referred to in the theory of four Worlds. In contrast to World 3, which does not act on World 1 by itself, World 4 can act on World 1 by itself [2.411-430].
4. SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY AND ENGINEERING COMMUNITY Although the term ‘scientific community’ was not proposed first by Kuhn, it became popular largely due to Kuhn’s influential work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [5]. We must pay attention to the fact that there is another community in society: engineering community. It is obvious that engineering communities are even more wide-spreading and important than scientific communities in society.
Scientific community and engineering community are different in their memberships. While scientific community comprises scientists, engineering community comprises engineers, managers, investors, workers and other stakeholders. There are a lot of important and complex issues about engineering community, such as why different individuals have to form an engineering community, how they organize an engineering community, and what kinds of relations exist in the engineering community, and so on.
The fact that engineering community is an important category both of philosophy of engineering and of sociology of engineering suggests that philosophy of engineering is closely related to sociology of engineering. In order to advance
research of philosophy of engineering, we shall conduct interdisciplinary research of engineering more generally.
Considering the engineering studies are parallel to science & technology studies we have published yearbooks engineering studies since 2004.
5. A FUNDAMENTAL THESIS OF PHILOSOPHY OF ENGINEERING Sometimes the term engineering refers to engineering subjects or engineering theory and sometimes it refers to engineering practice. Although engineering theory should not be neglected, this essay focuses on engineering practice. Engineering practice is the most important kind of praxis in society. Human being would not exist without engineering activity. However, philosophers have neglected research on engineering practice for a long time. As Goldman remarks: “[the] Western intellectual tradition displays a clear preference for understanding over doing, for contemplation over operation, for theory over experiment.” [6] In fact the Chinese intellectual tradition displays the same preference as the Western intellectual tradition does.
Nowadays, many things, including times, engineering practice itself, engineering theory itself, philosophy itself, philosophical community, engineering community, have began to change.
Carl Mitcham states: “Why is philosophy important to engineering? Ultimately and most deeply it is because engineering is philosophy - and through philosophy engineering will become more itself.” [7] At the same time we shall say: “Why is engineering important to philosophy? Ultimately and most deeply it is because philosophy is engineering - and through engineering philosophy will become more itself.” I consider Karl Marx’s Eleventh Feuerbachian Thesis as the first principal of philosophy of engineering: “Until now philosophers have only attempted to interpret the world; the point, however, is to change it.”
There are two different opinions about human nature that is the nucleus of philosophy. Many philosophers define humans as rational animals, but others define humans, in Benjamin Frankin’s words, as tool-making animals. From the point of view of epistemology the thesis “Cogito ergo cum”, i.e, “I-think-therefore-I-am”, is the basis of philosophy. However from the point of view of philosophy of engineering the thesis “I-create-therefore-I-am” or “I-make-therefore-I-am”, should be the basis of philosophy.
I consider that philosophy of engineering may not only be a branch of philosophy that is parallel to philosophy of science and philosophy of technology, but also be philosophy itself.
Today, philosophy of engineering has embarked on establishing itself. I believe that philosophy of engineering has a glorious future.
6. REFERENCES [1] Goldman S. L. and Cutcliffe S.H. 1991. Foreword. Durbin
P.T (ed.). Critical perspectives on nonacademic science and engineering. Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 7.
[2] Bocong Li. 2002. An introduction to philosophy of engineering. Zhengzhou: Daxiang Publishing Press.
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[3] Ruiyu Yin, Yingluo Wang, Bocong Li and et al. 2007. Philosophy of engineering. Beijing: Higher Education Press.
[4] Cheng Du and Bocong Li (ed.). 2004. Engineering studies. Beijing: Beijing institute of technology press.
[5] Kuhn, Thomas S. 1996. The Structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
[6] Goldman, S. L. 1990. Philosophy, engineering, and western culture. Durbin, P. T. (ed.). Broad and narrow interpretations of philosophy of technology, Kluwer Academic Publishers.
[7] Mitcham, C. 1998. The Importance of Philosophy to Engineering. Tecnos, Vol. XVII(3).
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A conceptual mismatch between theory and practice in engineering systems
Maarten Ottens Delft University of Technology
P.O. Box 5015 2600 GA Delft
+31 15 27 85143
1. INTRODUCTION In the relatively short time period during which engineering as an activity has existed, it has changed considerably, from the designing of bridges and simple machines to big and complex systems like intelligent transportation systems or electricity power systems. With these new design activities new problems emerge. Not just hardware failures, also non-compliance with legislation or intentional (mis)behavior can seriously jeopardize the intended (by the engineers) functioning of the system. Furthermore new technologies can generate new problems on the social or economic level that, if not addressed well, can have serious consequences, like power outages. Rather then trying to rule out all possible problem causes, the systems need to be reconceived constantly. The intentions of an individual in the system, for example, might not match the intentions of the designer, but these intentions are not necessarily ‘wrong’, and they might change the system. This situation requires a rethinking of classic engineering concepts like prediction and control as well as the concept of design itself. In my talk I will analyze several of such complex systems by looking at the theories about these systems at a conceptual level. I will argue that reassessing the underlying conceptual frameworks can enhance our understanding of such systems.
2. ENGINEERING AND PHILOSOPHY This endeavor, I argue, is significant both from a philosophical and an engineering perspective. With respect to philosophical concerns, it poses questions regarding the status of engineering theory, which aims at optimization and efficiency rather than truth, the concepts of engineering design, regarding the ontology of big complex systems, and even ethical questions concerning the autonomy of technology and accountability within technology. Although these questions are also addresses elsewhere, they are still in need of further research, in particular research that is not primarily based on theoretical considerations, but is grounded in the actual practices of designing and maintaining these complex systems. With respect to the concerns of engineers, this research will introduce a reassessment of conceptual frameworks currently used within engineering. Although one could argue that, given the usually well-functioning systems around us, engineering practice seems to be able to handle things well, the need for a conceptual reassessment is also voiced from within the engineering field. Attempts to look at fundamentals and to construct ontologies and discussions regarding the conceptual frameworks found in the engineering literature speak to this need. These attempts and discussions, however, suffer from a lack of analytical clarity, especially with regard to the use of concepts, a task philosophy could assist with.
3. ARGUMENT I will show that there is a mismatch between on the one hand conceptual frameworks in engineering theory focusing on complex sociotechnical systems, and on the other hand the actual design task with respect to these sociotechnical systems as engineers face it. This mismatch, as I will argue, is not merely a mismatch between theory and practice in a discipline where practice prevails. It is about the fundamental understanding of the possibilities and limitations that come with engineering theories and practices based in these theories; limitations that can lead to system failures. I will argue that, in particular, the understanding of social phenomena and of problems with both social and technical aspects in engineering theory has serious shortcomings. Such issues are either relegated to the outside world or treated exclusively on the basis of a technical/rational world view. This conceptual treatment of such aspects limits the understanding of the systems to which they belong, and with that they limit both the theoretical understanding and the practical handling of these systems. While the relation between practice and theory in engineering is not as strict as, for example, in physics,1 and perhaps should not be as strict, I argue that reassessing the underlying conceptual representations of engineering theories can help in reshaping theories to better match and even enhance the actual practice of (re)designing the complex sociotechnical systems that engineers face nowadays. I argue for a conceptual turn in engineering.
4. RESEARCH My research consists of a fourfold analysis. First I will conceptually analyze existing theories in the field(s) of systems engineering and formulate a set of core concepts as used within this field. I will analyze systems engineering standards by the International Council on Systems Engineering, the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) and the IEEE (the world’s biggest professional engineering association) [1-3]. Secondly I will present examples from three different case studies of actual (problematic) sociotechnical systems and the role of engineers therein. In particular I focus on (i) attempts to standardize cadastral systems; (ii) implementations of intelligent transportation systems with automated vehicles for public transport, traffic management systems and the automation of ordinary vehicles; and (iii) electricity power
1 For example Newton mechanics is sufficient for engineering,
not for physics.
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systems that span multiple countries and their different legal systems. Thirdly I will contrast engineering theories with a number of system theories outside of engineering that present alternative ways to describe, predict or prescribe ‘sociotechnical’ systems in their own [4-12]. Fourthly I will draw up an analytic conceptual representation of sociotechnical systems based on these alternative views, outline the differences with current engineering theory and practice, and present a new conceptual representation of the very systems engineers face.
5. REFERENCES [1] IEEE, IEEE 1220-2005 : IEEE Standard for Application
and Management of the Systems Engineering Process. 2005: IEEE.
[2] INCOSE, SYSTEMS ENGINEERING HANDBOOK; A “WHAT TO” GUIDE FOR ALL SE PRACTITIONERS. 2004, INCOSE. p. 320.
[3] ISO, ISO/IEC 15288, Systems engineering -- System life cycle processes. 2002, ISO/IEC.
[4] Bertalanffy, L.v., General system theory; foundations, development, applications. Rev. ed. 1968, New York,: G. Braziller. xxiv, 295 p.
[5] Bunge, M.A., A world of systems. 1979, Dordrecht ; Boston: Reidel. xvi, 314 p.
[6] Forrester, J.W., Industrial dynamics. 1961, [Cambridge, Mass.]: M.I.T. Press. 464 p.
[7] Giddens, A., The constitution of society : outline of the theory of structuration. 1984, Berkeley: University of California Press. xxxvii, 402 p.
[8] Hughes, T.P., The Evolution of Large Technological Systems, in The Social construction of technological systems : new directions in the sociology and history of technology, W.E. Bijker, T.P. Hughes, and T.J. Pinch, Editors. 1987, MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass. p. 51-82.
[9] Jackson, M.C., Systems approaches to management. 2000, New York ; London: Kluwer Academic/Plenum.
[10] Trist, E.L., The evolution of socio-technical systems : a conceptual framework and an action research program. Issues in the quality of working life, no. 2. 1981, Toronto: Ontario Ministry of Labour, Ontario Quality of Working Life Centre. 67 p.
[11] Ulrich, W., Critical heuristics of social planning : a new approach to practical philosophy. Schriftenreihe des Management-Zentrums St. Gallen ; Bd. 3. 1983, Bern: P. Haupt. 504 p.
[12] Wiener, N., Cybernetics; or, Control and communication in the animal and the machine. M.I.T. Technology Press publications. 1948, [Cambridge, Mass.]: Technology press. 194 p.
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On the importance of the Philosophy of Technology for engineers
James Craig Hanks Program in Philosophy
Stevens Institute of Technology Castle-Point-On-Hudson
Hoboken, NJ 07030 1-210-488-1572
ABSTRACT Most work in philosophy as it relates to engineering has been in the area of ethics. That is, when philosophers have bothered to think about engineering, which admittedly has not been very often, if the paucity of literature is any indication, they have tended to be interested in general questions of professional ethics together with some issues in risk specific to engineering. While this narrow approach clearly does not do justice to the range of philosophically interesting issues in engineering, I will argue that it also fails to do justice to engineering ethics.
I think that the philosophy of technology can inform, in important ways, the mindset and practice of engineers. This might seem a surprising claim. After all, many classic works in philosophy of technology makes use of a dense and sometimes obscure language that will seem foreign to most engineers. Additionally, many of the concerns of these works – the essence of technology, for instance – seem irrelevant to the practical work and applied ethical issues in engineering. Finally, as Ortega y Gassett’s claim that our present age being the most engineered is also the most empty illustrates, many
classical philosophers of technology seem outright hostile to engineering.
Still, I maintain that the philosophy of technology as traditionally understood, including figures such as Heidegger, Marcuse, Dewey, and so on, is important for engineering education and practice. The origin of this claim can be found in my nine years of teaching engineering ethics at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. For nine years, Fall, Spring, and sometimes Summer, I taught a required course in Engineering Ethics in which at least 50% of course material and time was given over to philosophy of technology. We used Martin and Schinzinger’s argument that engineering ought to be understood as social experimentation as the bridge between mainstream engineering ethics conceived as professional ethics and the philosophy of technology. In this paper I will detail the argument that underlies such a course design and explain how it is that the philosophy of technology can be helpful for responsible engineering practice ad thus ought to have a role in engineering education.
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Towards a Philosophy for Tools and their Uses: a way forward in “Dual-Use” situations
Raymond E. Spier, Emeritus Professor of Science and Engineering Ethics,
University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey,
GU2 7XH,UK Telephone/Fax; +44 1483 855 679
ABSTRACT A hammer may be used to knock in a nail or demolish the skull of a fellow living human. In the latter case the situation may be criminal or allowable as in self-defence. In either case we are looking at the practical use of a tool to achieve benefit or harm. Philosophers are those who love or revere wisdom which may be defined as making decisions as to how to behave in any delineated present or future situation. What then may Philosophers contribute to the seemingly anomalous situation with regard to the use of the hammer-tool that I have set out above? While my example of the hammer-tool may seem simplistic, the current situation is replete with the creation and invention of a welter of new tools whose immediate and developed properties have yet to be ascertained. Biotechnology, Nanotechnology, Informatics and Robotics constitute a selection of the new areas in which new tools are being designed, constructed and manufactured. Many of these tools have the power to transform humanity and the way we exist. Their uses can provide benefits in supporting our survival and well being as well as the means whereby we can inflict harm on ourselves and others at scales that are barely imaginable. But in principle, they do not present any philosophical problems that we have not met before in our use of the hand-axe, fire, the hammer or a pen. Tools do not exist of themselves; they do not arrive sui generis. Material entities become tools as and when humans (and sometimes animals) make a mental determination that such and such an object (with or without modification) may serve a purpose that cannot be achieved by the unaided body of that individual. So it is spurious to cast aspersions at the tool itself. But when a tool is made, it becomes more than the material with which it is constructed; it has embedded into its being the intentionality of the tool-maker. A log lying on the floor of a
forest is just that: in the hands of a human or chimpanzee it can become a weapon for protection or aggression. It is the maker and/or bearer of the tool that gives the tool its ethical character. So the issue of the philosophy of tool use or the ethical aspects of the dual use property of all tools has to be translated into what goes on the mind of the bearer or controller of the use of the tool. Intentionality, is at the epicentre of this issue. While intentionality has its position in courts of law it is an essentially private property of an individual. What that person divulges of his or her intentions may or may not be as they really are. This presents a problem to a philosopher or ethicist. We may get over the technical issue of whether a lie has been delivered by the application of the latest Magnetic Resonance Imaging technology. This is capable of examining the state of the brain when engaged in answering questions about, say, the intentionality of the use of a tool. Answers that are given with the intention of deceiving the interrogator may be so identified. But while this is a valuable retrogressive examination of what has already happened, it does not help us with an intended tool use directed at harming large numbers of our fellow humans. Here we have, at present, to rely on the vigilance of all members of the society to be aware of the emergence of any intentionality (manifested in either an individual or a group) that may be turned to the harm of the members of the community: to report that state of mind and to allow the authorities to deal with the purported threat to the society. Yes, this requires that all the individuals of the society have a responsibility to be aware of the states of mind of their neighbours. This transgresses the lines of privacy and non-interference: an ethical issue that has to be resolved. Or, we can work hard and make a device that when implanted in the human brain gives an early warning of the intention to do harm – but there we go again; yet another ethical problem for philosophers.
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Engineering Determinacy Technology and the exclusion of the indeterminate
Albrecht Fritzsche TU Darmstadt,
64283 Darmstadt, Germany [email protected]
Keywords Meaning of technology, indeterminacy, philosophy and engineering, means and media, postmodern thinking.
1. INDETERMINACY TODAY One characteristic of modern thinking is the significant change of the way man looks at indeterminacy [1]. The enlightment of the seventeenth and eighteenth century was a project to establish reason as a firm basis for human life. The modern has made the experience that this project cannot be fully completed. There is always some leftover beyond the reach of reason: Lyotard discovers it in the showing of the indescribable in modern art, Heisenberg expresses it in the principle of uncertainty in quantum mechanics, Foucault identifies it as the shadow of the unthinkable in the relation between subject and object. At the same time, the modern is the age of technology. We live in a world where technology has penetrated all areas of human life in such a deep and profound way that we can hardly recognize it any more. Technology is in its broadest sense nothing else but any kind of determination of structure. When Ortega y Gasset describes technology as the effort to avoid effort, he addresses this determination: we can avoid effort with technology, because it allows us not to care once it is installed - when things are determined, we can leave them alone [2].
2. TECHNOLOGY DETERMINES We argue in this paper that the spaces of technological determinacy are in fact carefully engineered. Technology only becomes possible because indeterminacy can be excluded from these spaces. The basic idea behind this process is closely related to Aristotle's principle of appropriate actions in a given situation. The spaces of determinacy are big enough to cover the problem situation in general, but they cannot claim completeness of representation. Completeness is renounced during the process of engineering spaces of determinacy in quite different ways. Regarding the extent of technical objects, norms define the level of exactness they have to claim. Regarding the access to these objects, stochastic considerations avoid single real life experiences and focus only on the average and the standard deviation. Regarding the procedure of action, it is embedded in a context of constraints which are never fully expressed. Regarding the prediction of effects, the full responsibility is attributed to the user, not the technology.
3. TECHNOLOGY AND REFLECTION In philosophical discussions, the attitude towards incompleteness of determination is usually based on reflections about experiences of determinacy ([3], also [4]). It tends to have the quality of a denial, stating that any expectation that determinacy could be complete has to fail. Thus misinterpretations of the power of rationality are corrected. In some way, this may be considered an enlightment of a corrupted enlightment. When technological determination is understood as a treatment of indeterminacy, the quality of the reflection changes. Instead of forming an opposition against determinacy, we are now talking about the ways how indeterminacy is excluded from the spaces of determination beforehand. Being the point of reference of the reflection, the space of determinacy itself gains a different quality. We arrive at a similar conclusion as Christoph Hubig's recent interpretation of Hegel from a technological point of view [5]. As he says: technology becomes a "term of reflection".
4. THE HUMAN ELEMENT This line of thought leads to the question about the relation
of human life and technology. It seems impossible to live without technology. At the same time, the engineering of spaces of determinacy is no monolithic block. We always have the chance to establish technology in a different way. It might therefore be worth considering the human as the nexus in the network of all forms of engineering, and shaping his existence by emphasizing the multitude of technology.
5. REFERENCES [1] Gamm, G. 1994: Flucht aus der Kategorie: die
Positivierung des Unbestimmten als Ausgang aus der Moderne. Frankfurt.
[2] Ortega y Gasset J. 1978: Betrachtungen über die Technik, in: ders.: Gesammelte Werke Band IV, Stuttgart 7-96.
[3] Hubig, C. 2005: Wirkliche Virtualität. Medialitätsveränderung und der Verlust der Spuren. In: Gamm, G. & Hetzel, A. (eds.): Unbestimmtheitssignaturen der Technik. Bielefeld, 39–62.
[4] Kaminski, A. 2004: Technik als Erwartung. In: Dialektik Zeitschrift für Kulturphilosophie, Hamburg, 2, 137–150.
[5] Hubig, C 2006: Die Kunst des Möglichen I. Technikphilosophie als Reflexion der Medialität. Bielefeld.
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Perspectives on use of artifacts in education Some contributions from philosophy of technology
and engineering science Jonte Bernhard
Linköping University, Dept of Science and Technology (ITN), Engineering Education Research Group
Campus Norrköping, SE-601 74 Norrköping, Sweden
ABSTRACT Human experiences of our lifeworld are shaped by physical and symbolic tools (mediating tools). A common denominator in the design of many “innovative” learning environments is the insightful and careful application of computer based measurement technology as a mediating tool. Our research has shown that the way these tools are designed and implemented is critical for learning outcomes. Philosophy of technology deals with such questions as what role does technology (artifacts) play in everyday human experience: How do technological artifacts affect the existence of humans and their relations with the world and within our world? How do artifacts produce and transform human knowledge and how are human knowledge included in artifacts? What are the acts of artifacts? In this paper insights from philosophy of technology and theories of mediated action will be presented and related to the design of learning environments and analysis of learning. It is concluded that the role of technology cannot be overlooked and that design of learning environments could be seen as ‘engineering’.
Keywords Mediation, engineering education, postphenomenology.
1. INTRODUCTION In 1940 Müller [1] stated that:
“There is little evidence to show that the mind of modern man is superior to that of the ancients. His tools are incomparably better.”
I argue here that to study learning and cognition properly we must take an experiential perspective [2, 3] and study person-world relationships. In line with the concept of “intentionality” stemming from Brentano we must treat the humans-world correlate as a unity. To do this we must study the tools, i.e. technologies, used by humans since, as implied by Müller above and succinctly expressed by Mitcham [4], we “think through technology”. Tools are an essential part of our lifeworld. As a researcher and as an educator I have been involved in studying and developing technology rich learning environments in engineering education. My own schooling includes studies in engineering and in philosophy and both are an essential foundation for my research in education. Below I will describe that parts of philosophy of technology is also a philosophy of education and a philosophy of mind.
2. EDUCATION AS ENGINEERING SCIENCE
In my view technology is participating in the kinds of actions that make up our lives. Tools (i.e. conceptual and physical
artifacts) play an important role in human thinking and learning. The important role of technology in education have been pointed out by Nora Sabelli [5] who claims
”what and how we learn have always depended on the tools available to students and teachers and should change with significant changes in the tools available. … [E]ducators [are] responsible for exploring the profound pedagogical implications of the changes brought about by technology on the practice of science.” (my emphasis)
However, I would claim, an careful analysis of the role of technology is very often missing in educational analysis (cf. [6]). According to Mitcham [4]
“artifact design is what constitutes the essence of engineering. … Technology is not so much the application of knowledge as a form of knowledge …”.
Considering the importance the use of tools has in education I claim that education could in some sense be seen as an engineering science. Engineers are trained in artifact design and in understanding and improving systems. They should be trainined to understand that humans are part of systems. One of the question philosophy of technology deals with is “what role does technology (artifacts) play in everyday human experience?”. Thus approaches, and knowledge, from engineering science and philosophy of technology can contribute to the understanding and development of learning environments.
3. PHILOSOPHY OF TECHNOLOGY AND MEDIATED ACTION
Human experience of our world is, as briefly mentioned in the introduction, shaped by physical and symbolic tools (mediating tools). The concept of mediation could be represented diagrammatically as: Human ⇔ Mediating tools ⇔ World Questions about the role of technology (artifacts) in everyday human experience include: How do technological artifacts affect the existence of humans and their relationship with the world? How do artifacts produce and transform human knowledge? How is human knowledge incorporated into artifacts? What are the actions of artifacts? The use of tools is a dual process: humans both shape the world (including human culture) and are shaped through the use of tools (cf. Verbeek [7]). Tools play important roles in Dewey's philosophies of both education and technology [8]. In the socio-cultural theory of learning and in activity-theory, which is rooted in the thinking of Vygotsky, “tool” and “mediation” are key concepts [9, 10].
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Don Ihde has synthesized non-foundational phenomenology and pragmatism in an approach dubbed postphenomenology [11]. According to him perception is co-determined by technology. In science instruments do not merely “mirror reality”, but mutually constitute the reality investigated. The technology used places some aspects of reality in the foreground, others in the background, and makes certain aspects visible that would otherwise be invisible. Neglecting the role of technology in science leads to naïve realism [12] or to naïve idealism [13].
4. TECHNOLOGY AND LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS
“Microcomputer Based Laboratory” (MBL) activities are examples of the use of “interactive technology” as a tool for learning in physics and engineering education [14]. In MBL activities students do experiments using various sensors (e.g., force, motion, temperature, light or sound sensors) connected to a computer via an interface. The arrangement provides a powerful system for simultaneous collection, analysis and display of experimental data, sometimes referred to as real-time graphing. We have successfully applied MBL-technology for learning mechanics [15] and for learning electric circuit theory [16]. However, I have also shown that MBL-technology can be implemented in ways that lead to low achievements in conceptual tests, thus refuting technological determinism. My findings indicate that the educational implementation is crucial [15].
The way technologies are implemented in the Human ⇔ Technology ⇔ World relationships shapes figure-background relationships, i.e. what students can discern and thus learn. Certain concepts or features are brought to the fore, i.e. into students’ focal awareness [17], by the technology. Other features of the situation, physical as well as non-physical, are not highlighted. However, a proper analysis of technology is missing in most analysis of learning environments. I argue if we want to understand why some curricula utilising MBL are successful, but not others, we must analyze the role of technologies in depth in each case [18].
5. CONCLUSION In conclusion I argue that to use technologies as learning tools in education, to their full potential, we must understand their cognitive role(s). In this analysis philosophy of technology can make essential contributions to our understanding. Thus philosophy of technology can contribute to engineering education not only with critical reflections about what kind of skills and awareness are important for a sound engineering practise, but philosophy can also contribute to an understanding of how technologies can be used in education and in human perception.
6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Grants from the Swedish Research Council and the Council for Renewal of Higher Education are gratefully acknowledged.
7. REFERENCES [1] Müller, R. H. American Apparatus, Instruments, and
Instrumentation. Industrial and Engineering Chemistry: Analytical Edition, 12 (1940), 571-630.
[2] Marton, F. Phenomenography: Describing conceptions of the world around us. Instructional Science, 10 (1981), 177-200.
[3] Dewey, J. 1925/1981. Experience and Nature. In John Dewey: The Later Works, J.A. Boydston, Ed. Southern Illinois University Press.
[4] Mitcham, C. 1994. Thinking through Technology: The Path between Engineering and Philosophy. The University of Chicago Press.
[5] Sabelli, N. For Our Children's Sake, Take Full Advantage of Technology. Computers in Physics, 9 (1995), 7.
[6] Waltz, S. B. Giving artifacts a voice? Bringing into account technology in educational analysis, Educational Theory. 54 (2004), 157-172.
[7] Verbeek, P.-P. 2005. What Things Do: Philosophical reflections on technology, agency, and design. The Pennsylvania State University Press.
[8] Hickman, L. 1990. John Dewey's Pragmatic Technology. Indiana University Press.
[9] Vygotsky, L. 1978. Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.
[10] Miettinen, R. Artifact Mediation in Dewey and in Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, Mind, Culture & Activity, 8 (2001), 297-308.
[11] Selinger, E. ed. 2006. Postphenomenology: A Critical Companion to Ihde. State University of New York Press.
[12] Ihde, D. 1991. Instrumental Realism: The Interface between Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Technology. Indiana University Press.
[13] Ihde D. and Selinger. E. eds. 2003. Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality. Indiana University Press.
[14] Tinker, R. F. ed. 1996. Microcomputer-Based Labs: Educational research and Standards. Springer.
[15] Bernhard, J. 2003. Physics learning and microcomputer based laboratory (MBL): Learning effects of using MBL as a technological and as a cognitive tool. In Science Education Research in the Knowledge Based Society, D. Psillos, et al., Eds. Kluwer, pp. 313-321.
[16] Carstensen A.-K. and Bernhard, J. Critical aspects for learning in an electric circuit theory course - an example of applying learning theory and design-based educational research in developing engineering education. In Proceedings of First International Conference on Research in Engineering Education (Honolulu, 2007).
[17] Marton, F. and Booth, S. 1997. Learning and Awareness. Lawrence Erlbaum.
[18] Bernhard, J. Thinking and learning through technology - Mediating tools and insights from philosophy of technology applied to science and engineering education. The Pantaneto Forum, 27 (2007).
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Issues to be RAISED: ethical and social considerations in nanotechnology research
D. Schuurbiers Delft University of Technology,
Working Group on Biotechnology & Society
Julianalaan 67 2628 BC Delft
+31 15 278 6514
S. Sleenhoff Delft University of Technology,
Working Group on Biotechnology & Society
Julianalaan 67 2628 BC Delft
+31 15 278 6626
D. Bennett Cambridge Biomedical Consultants
Oude Delft 60 2611 CD Delft
+31 15 212 7800
ABSTRACT Nanotechnologies are expected to have a profound impact on societies and economies around the globe. At the same time, public awareness of nanotechnology is very low, which has led many to consider nanotechnology to be the next major public, media and political issue after nuclear energy and genetically modified (GM) food. Nanobio-RAISE is a European Commission-funded project bringing together the key relevant players in the field to: • horizon-scan for scientific and commercial developments
likely to cause concern, • clarify the ethical issues and public concerns involved and
carry out strategies for public communication to address them,
• take on board the lessons learned from the GM debate and apply them to the nanotechnology discussions.
These objectives are being realized by an ethics research and communications program carried out from 2006 to 2008, consisting of horizon-scanning workshops, an Expert Group, public opinion focus group discussions, advanced ethics and public communication courses, a series of briefing papers, ethics presentations at scientific conferences and public relations activities.
General Terms Design, Experimentation, Human Factors, Legal Aspects.
Keywords nanotechnology, ethics, society, public, media
TWO ADVANCED COURSES Two 5-day residential Advanced Courses on Public Communication & Applied Ethics of Nanotechnology for research and company scientists were held as part of the Nanobio-RAISE project in Oxford, March and September 2007. They aimed to increase awareness of social and ethical issues and to enable the participants to carry out a wide variety of public communication activities. The courses follow the UK Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering 2004 nanotechnology report’s recommendation: “We recommend that the consideration
of ethical and social implications of advanced technologies (such as nanotechnologies) should form part of the formal training of all research students and staff working in these areas ...” 1
Background and scope Current science curricula do not pay much attention to the wider implications of scientific and technological research. The time needed to educate students in these highly specialized fields does not allow for detailed consideration of social and ethical aspects of scientific developments - their careers in science depend on detailed scientific knowledge. Scientific and technological developments do not occur in isolation however; the products and applications that enter the market often have a major impact on society and, conversely, their acceptability by society largely determines their uptake. The Advanced Courses combine deeper understanding of ethical and social issues with intensive practical, hands-on training. The programme involves leading experts in public affairs and communication, bioethics, public perceptions, risk assessment, law and regulatory affairs in the nanotechnology field. Through case studies, debate sessions, role play and group work participants are familiarized with ethical and social issues in nanotechnology and the various topics and positions in the debate. The participants of the course acquire: • knowledge of the relevant ethical, legal and social aspects
of nanotechnology, • skills to communicate effectively with the media and the
public, • understanding of issues involved in the public acceptance
of nanotechnology.
Socially robust science policies can only be accomplished if scientists are aware of their roles and responsibilities towards their shareholders - the public. These courses aimed to achieve just that.
1 "Nanoscience and nanotechnologies: opportunities and uncertainties", London: The Royal Society & The Royal Academy of Engineering, 2004.
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Formulators’ Dilemma: Public Perception, Evidentiary Standards and Distributive Justice in safety design of
Nano-cosmetics Prof.Julian Kinderlerer
Delft University of Technology, Working Group on Biotechnology & Society
Julianalaan 67 2628 BC Delft
+31 15 278 5140
Kuan-Ting Chi Delft University of Technology, Working Group on
Biotechnology & Society Julianalaan 67 2628 BC Delft
+31 15 278 6654
ABSTRACT Formulators in the cosmetic industry hold a position in between raw material producers and end product manufacturers in the production chain. They share the high liability risk with manufacturers for the comparatively close distance to end users, but they generally do not possess as much safety information as raw material producers have. They are the group that of most innovation pressure, comparatively low assess to safety data of raw materials, but comparatively high liability risk. Current regulatory strategies have put formulators in a worse situation than they generally are; nevertheless, in the policy making process, formulators are the group that usually stayed voiceless. In this article, the author attempt to use nano-cosmetic safety design as an example to show the need to raise the awareness of and to include chemical engineers who works as formulators to the relevant policy debate. The first part of the paper addresses the essential role of the underlying regulatory philosophy in this field, together with its implication in safety evaluation and liability litigation. The second half of the paper tries to depict the philosophical debate that would have impact on the judgment of engineers’ behavior in court cases. Evidentiary requirements are used as the centre line to demonstrate the interweaving relationship between law, philosophy and science.
General Terms Design, Safety, Human Factors, Legal Aspects.
Keywords nanobiotechnology, ethics, liability, consumer products, scientific evidence
Regulatory philosophy and its implication Since 2001, the campaign for safe cosmetics in the US has drawn a lot of public attention on the adverse health impact of toxic ingredients used in cosmetics and other personal care products, such as body lotion and sunscreens1. Known threats
1 See for example, Tim Little, Sanford Lewis, Pamela Lundquist, “Beneath the Skin—Hidden Liabilities, Market Risk and Drivers of Change in the Cosmetics and Personal Care Products Industry”, Investor Environmental Health Network & Rose Foundation for Communities and Environment, February 2007
to health from these products ranging from cancer, harm to developing fetuses and infants exposed to the chemicals through baby products or their mother’s cosmetics use, and disruptions of various organ or hormonal systems in the body. Nevertheless, regulatory policies both in the EU and US2 have exhibited a tendency to stick to the old regulatory philosophy that the external parts of the human body to which cosmetics are applied (the skin), together with teeth and oral mucous membranes, are a separate external envelope, which is not linked to internal parts of the body or with the mind. This underlying belief has led to two current regulatory strategies that put formulators in a position of higher legal risk of liability claims. Firstly, the belief that cosmetics are generally safe to use has led to little regulatory oversight in this field. There is no pre-marketing authorization process for cosmetic products, which means that health threats or actual harms may only be found after widespread penetration into the market and exposure to potentially millions of customers while there is no clear regulatory safety screening process that could shield formulators from product design defect claims. Low regulatory priority also led to poor accumulation and circulation of safety data. Over 90% of the chemicals registered for industrial use are currently produced with very poor safety data. The new EU chemical regulation, REACh3, comes with a designed platform for information exchange; however, it only applies to around 60% of the chemicals manufactured in or imported into Europe. Secondly, the belief that “cosmetics do not affect the ‘structure or function’ of the body in a drug-like way and thus are not likely to pose significant safety concerns” has also led to less social tolerant of animal testing for substances intended for use as cosmetics or cosmetic ingredients than for substances as a
2 RPA, Comparative Study on Cosmetics Legislation in the EU and Other Principal Markets with Special Attention to so-called Borderline Products, Final Report prepared for European Commission DG Enterprise, August 2004; U.S. Food and Drug Administration, “Nanotechnology: A Report of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Nanotechnology Task Force”, July 25, 2007 3 REACH stands for Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation
and Restriction of Chemicals. REACH Regulation (EC) No 1907/2006 and Directive 2006/121/EC amending Directive 67/548/EEC were published in the Official Journal on 30 December 2006, and entered into force on 1 June 2007.
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whole. The testing ban agreed between the legislators and animal warfare groups through the 6th and 7th Amendment of the Cosmetic Directive (Council Directive 76/768/EEC) has left formulators in a situation where not only little existing safety data is available but also very few testing methods can be used to test for safety. This is especially a problem for nano-cosmetics developers, as at present there is ‘no’ in vitro testing methodology that has been validated for nanomaterials.
Evidentiary requirements and distributive justice The cosmetic industry is heavily image driven, and the market is highly competitive; innovation plays a key role in market share. Manufacturers generally reformulate 25% of their products annually; each week there are thousands new formulations on the market worldwide. In the recent decades, cosmetic products have largely turned to the marketing strategy of promoting the sense of ‘well-being’. Contrary to the regulatory philosophy, cosmetic products are much more than only the “painted faces”. These products carry strong links to our social identity (for example, teenagers’ subculture fashion, professional ‘dress’ code) and personal well-being (personal hygiene, cancer patient mental health management, for example). The ability to manage “personal well-being” through the aid of cosmetics products represents the ability to manage the social ‘self’ in modern context. These trends have made cosmetic industry much vulnerable to health risk claims. Formulators are thus not only under high pressure for the tight innovation time frame but also under the pressure to meet the high health and safety standards expected from consumers. This put formulators in an extreme vulnerable position to the ‘consumer expectation’ criterion for product defect evaluation in product liability litigation.
In the past two decades, philosophical reflection on the uncertainties in carcinogen risk assessment has put the use of scientific evidence of statistics from human epidemiological studies and animal bioassays into strict scrutiny. Philosophers have argued from the viewpoint of distributive justice that concerns over scientific validity of scientific evidence should not lead to under compensation in environmental and toxic tort cases 4 ; therefore, a more flexible standard in terms of the permissibility of scientific evidence should be adopted.
4 See for example, Carl F. Cranor, “Regulating Toxic
Substances—A philosophy of Science and the Law, Oxford University Press, 1993 New York; “Toxic Torts: Science, Law and the Possibility of Justice”, Cambridge University Press, 2006
Nevertheless, legal professionals, especially defense lawyers tend to stick to traditional legal accuracy, which demands higher certainty than scientific community normally does. Whether philosophers’ or defense lawyers’ view become dominant in real court cases, both will be different from the risk assessment approach adopted in engineering training. This will place engineers in a difficult position as the scientific information upon which they based their decisions are looked at through rather different viewpoints.
When Nano comes to the scene The incorporation of nanotechnology in production of cosmetic has provoked much debate on the availability and interpretation of toxicity data. As incorporation of nanotechnology into cosmetic product production appeared so far mainly on innovation at formulation level5, are formulators ready to face the challenges from these policy debates? Formulators in the cosmetic industry hold a position in between raw material producers and end product manufacturers in the production chain. They share the high liability risk with manufacturers for the comparatively close distance to end users, but they generally do not possess as much safety information as raw material producers have. They are the group that of most innovation pressure, comparatively low assess to safety data of raw materials, but comparatively high liability risk. Nevertheless, in the policy making process, formulators are the group that almost always stayed voiceless. As mentioned in previous section that there is no regulatory standards to shield them from negligent claim in liability litigation thanks to the problematic regulatory philosophy, nor is there any in vitro testing methodology that has been validated for nanomaterials. While at the same time, philosophical examination of communication between legal institution and scientific institution suggested legal reform to allow better compensation. Have engineers been made aware about their legal position? Have they been educated to understand the policy debate process and the social context that has shaped the situation they are in?
5 See Scientific Committee on Consumer Products, Health & Consumer Protection Directorate-General, “Preliminary Opinion on Safety of Nanomaterials in Cosmetic Products”, Approved by the SCCP for public consultation 12th plenary of 19 June 2007; also ibid. 2.
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Techno-Socialization of a Human Being Elena A. NIKITINA
Moscow State Institute of Radiotechnics, Electronics and Automatics (Technical University)
Moscow, Russia [email protected]
Keywords Philosophy and new technological reality, socialization, personality, intellectual evolution of a man, electronic civilization
1. INTRODUCTION Environment where an individual human being adapts to social norms and thus undergoes socialization (defined here as adaptation of an individual to socially elaborated and socially controlled forms of action and activities) is dramatically changing under influence of intensive development of information technologies. Such information technologies, IT-culture at large, became one of most demanded and widely spread modern technological innovations. Electronic IT-culture leads to “intellectualization” of the techno-environment of the mankind, broader application of an artificial intelligence (AI) as a result of a spread of use of intellectual systems in society (in economics, banking, education, medicine, state governance, etc.).
2. Е-ENVIRONMENT FOR SHAPING OF A HUMAN PERSONALITY WITHIN A TECHNOLOGICAL CIVILIZATION New quality of socialization of a man requires introducing a new term: “techno-socialization” (techno-socio adaptation) of a human being. Study of techno-socialization inevitably holds inter-disciplinary character, as far as object of a study is a binary system consisting of two elements: “human being – active techno-environment”. Within such a system a researcher goes beyond traditional field of ergonomics studies and finds itself in a realm of socio-philosophical analysis, philosophical anthropology, sociology, social psychology, etc. Object of the study includes new conditions of socialization of a man, new ways of identification of personality, new contradictions and risks of human existence, prospects for development of a “Homo-Electronicus” or “ E-homo”. These issues started to be discussed in Russia on inter-disciplinary conferences [1 and others] and in inter-disciplinary research communities [see, for exemple, http:/www.scmai.philosophy.ru/]/
3. E-ENVIRONMENT FOR EDUCATION Mentioned issues are very important from the practical point of view, as far as in information society education gradually becomes one of the leading branches of the information sector of the economy. In Russia special Federal Target Program “Development of Joint Educational Informational Environment” (2001-2005) has been adopted and fulfilled, aimed at formation of a network of technical support for educational schools and establishments in Russia, implanting of newest information technologies into the educational process, formation of regional infrastructures of joint educational informational environment. If at the beginning of the current decade only 20% of Russian school children had an access to computers at home, by 2003 this figure doubled to 40%, and reached 75% of computers accessibility in schools. 30% of Russian pupils use PCs for doing homework (while in the USA
this parameter reaches 95%). But situation remains demanding: if in the USA there are 3 PC in schools for every 10 pupils, in Russia – only 3 PC for every 100 pupils, and only 10% of school computers in Russia have Internet access [4].
4. DIRECTION OF EVOLUTION OF HUMAN INTELLECTUAL CAPACITIES IN CONDITIONS OF “ELECTRONIC CIVILIZATION” After all, study of a natural intelligence takes new dimensions on the modern level in connection with arrival of scientific data proving continuation of a cognitive evolution of a man resulting from intellectualization of techno-environment. From this point of view the following issues have become urgent: Whether development of an Artificial Intelligence contributes to the development of natural intellectual capacities of modern man, or, vice-versa, weakens them? How to modify interaction of a man with intellectual systems aimed at most optimal combination of strongest features of human and artificial intellectual capacities? What are the evolutionary and cultural essences of an intellectual activity of a man? In the area of epistemology new group of issues gets into the focus, such as issues connected with systematization and development of knowledge regarding artificial intelligence, on functions of intellect in learning, modes of thinking, types of rationality.
5. COGNITIVE EVOLUTION CONTINUES Thus, study of techno-socialization of a man, of a human being becomes one of most prospective trend in inter-disciplinary cooperation of philosophers and practitioners. Cognitive evolution of a human being, as study shows, has not been finished at reaching the stage of Homo sapiens, but continued in new directions under the influence of arrival of electronic civilization. This new stage of cognitive evolution is characterized by the relative loss of unity of consciousness, fragmentation of cognition, domination of situational method of personality’s self-identification. REFERENCES [1] Artificial Intelligence: Philosophy, Methodology,
Innovation. Proceeding of the First All-Russian conference of students, post-graduates and young scientists. Moscow, MIREA, April 6-8, 2006, Ed. By D.Dubrovsky and E.Nikitina – Moscow, IInteLL, 2006.
[2] Narinyani A. New Man of a Nearest Future. http://www.rian.ru/analytics/20060619/497311664.html.
[3] Finn V.K. Intellectual Systems and Society. Collection of articles / Preface by D.Pospelov, D.Lakhuti, V.Tarasov. Second edition, Moscow, Komkniga, 2006.
[4] http://www.pcweek.ru?ID=6005330
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Engineering, Culture and Engineering Culture Bao, Ou
Center of Science, Technology and Society, Tsinghua University Beijing, 100084, China
Keywords Engineering Culture, Engineering Community, Characteristics of integrity, Permeability, Timeliness, Extensity, Aesthetics
1. INTRODUCTION Engineering is the human activity which has the kernel of creating, and it includes not only designing or manufacturing activities and processes, but also includes the results of these activities and processes—engineering products.
The essence of the culture is the existence and the representation of the human thoughts and activity modes.
Engineering is one kind of cultural symbol. In the history of mankind, the engineering results become the cultural heritage, which records the evolutionary history of humanity, exposes human weakness, and agglomerates human wisdom.
Engineering is the display of culture. In the engineering practice processes, different times, different places, different ethnic groups, different knowledge and skills background and different aesthetics will all influence the design, construction of the specific projects and even the maintenance of the project results.
Engaged in specific project decision makers, investors, designers, implementers (including engineers and workers), maintenance personnel and even those who enjoy the projects pose each other the Engineering Community with complex relationships and related benefits.
Why a specific project to gather people with many types vocational and cultural backgrounds, can be finally completed
(unfinished original design of the project, is a disguised form of complete results)? Why different times and different cultural backgrounds will produce different results of the project? Etc. To answer these questions need to build the concept of "Engineering Culture" and the theory of engineering culture.
"Engineering Culture" is the ways of thinking and behavior rules of Engineering Community’s engineering activities. It belongs to subculture, and includes the tangible and intangible contents of the two parts. The tangible content of the main works includes scientific knowledge, design specifications, construction standards, project management systems, construction procedures, the operator rules, labor discipline, production regulations, safety measures, the testing standard after the construction and maintenance regulations; the training for the members of the Engineering Community, examination systems, daily management and service systems, and even a special code of conduct (for example : Secrets Ordinance), the dress code requirements. Intangible content includes the thoughts and spirit, the volition Etc. for guiding the engineering construction. Different aspects of the rules of conduct will engender very different engineering cultures.
Engineering Culture has the characteristics of integrity, permeability, timeliness, extensity and aesthetics, also has the function of affecting the level of engineering design, the implementation of the project quality and the reasonable project evaluation criteria, and may affect the future engineering development.
Visibility, engineering culture is closely related to the engineering works, and is the “spiritual elements" and "concrete" of it. It is worth to be common thought by philosophers and members of the Engineering Community.
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Interactive Empiricism: The Philosopher in the Machine
[Extended Abstract]
Ron ChrisleyCOGS/Department of Informatics
University of SussexBrighton, United [email protected]
A two-way beneficial interaction between philosophy andengineering is identified and analysed. The first direction(engineering assisting philosophy), is a result of the largelyunacknowledged fact that some philosophical breakthroughsmay only come about through attempting to design andbuild working systems. The second direction (philosophyassisting engineering) is a result of the fact that buildingcomplex systems (e.g. an artificial consciousness) might re-quire incorporating theorists, including philosophers, intothe design of such systems. That is, the theorist/philosopheris considered another component of the system that con-tributes to its dynamics. Such incorporation reflects bothhow the system affects the theorist/philosopher interactingwith it (including, but not limited to, the conceptual changesmentioned in the first direction of interaction, above), andhow the theorist/philosopher in turn affects the system (in-cluding, but not limited to, design changes based on interaction-generated conceptual change).
1. DIRECTION 1: ENGINEERING CONCEP-TUAL CHANGE
Philosophy deals with conceptual problems. Not all limi-tations on our understanding of the natural world are a mat-ter of insufficient data; some are because we lack the rightconcepts. The difficulties in providing a scientific under-standing of consciousness are a vivid example. On one anal-ysis, roadblocks to progress stem from a paradoxical conflictwithin our concept of consciousness. On the one hand, mostof us have the naturalist intuition that consciousness (likeeverything else) is at root a physical phenomenon. On theother hand, most of us also have the“Zombie hunch”(cf Den-nett), that it is possible for there to be a creature physicallyidentical to a conscious human that is not itself conscious.Most attempts to solve this problem accept our concept ofconsciousness and try to prove one or the other intuitionmistaken. But if both intuitions derive from our concept ofconsciousness, the only real solution is to switch to anotherconcept of consciousness (cf, e.g., Nagel).
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It seems unlikely that this conceptual change could itselfcome about purely conceptually, merely by acquiring morebeliefs, engaging in philosophical argumentation, readingjournal articles, etc. Rather, problems of consciousness seemto require a non-conceptual development in our concepts:changes that cannot be brought about via discursive, propo-sitional reasoning alone. Non-conceptual change to one’smental life, including change to one’s concepts, could comeabout via disease, neurosurgery mishap, or drugs, but theseare not the kinds of non-conceptual change that are relevanthere. What is relevant is change that is non-conceptual, butstill rational, justified and based on experience of the subjectmatter.
To help envision what kind of change could be, we canturn to Wittgenstein’s insight that what underlies beingable to move between ways of seeing something (e.g. theduck-rabbit, or the Necker cube) is the “mastery of a tech-nique”. If this is so, then perhaps some concepts are bestthought of as skills, and thus some concept acquisition (orchange) is like skill acquisition (or improvement). Just asone can’t read/argue/theorize one’s way to knowing how toride a bike, so also may it be with some concepts. It may bethat certain kinds of experience, such as interaction with thephenomenon the concept is about, are required in order forconceptual acquisition or development to occur. We can callthis proposal interactive empiricism. Unlike normal empiri-cism, passive experience isn’t sufficient for mastery of theconcepts in question. Rather, robust interaction is crucial:one must develop a practical knowledge of how one’s expe-riences of the subject change in the light of one’s differentinterventions.
This emphasis on interaction is consonant with much re-cent research in cognitive science, which sees interaction tomany aspects of cognition, including perception (e.g. O’Reganand Noe’s Sensorimotor Contingency Theory), consciousness(e.g. Hurley’s Consciousness in Action), and cognition ingeneral (e.g. Bickhard’s “Interactivism: A Manifesto”). Butperhaps the most useful metaphor may be drawn from therelatively older work by Held and Hein on the role of inter-action in mammalian visual development. Their landmarkwork with neo-nate cats found that a kitten whose visualinput during development was not systematically related toits bodily movements (i.e., one for whom no true interac-tion took place) did not develop properly functioning vision:the kitten was effectively blind. The metaphorical insight isthis: perhaps the development of many concepts in humanslike this, requiring experience of the systematic dependen-cies between our interventions in the subject matter and
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their effects. And what goes for cognitive science goes formeta-cognitive science. A science of human cognition in gen-eral should apply to the cognition of cognitive scientists inparticular. If cognitive science is right that some conceptualdevelopment is essentially interactive, then development ofsome of the concepts used in cognitive science, such as theconcept of consciousness, may require interaction as well.
An important step, then, in resolving the conceptual im-passe concerning consciousness is to determine the kinds ofinteraction that can provide the proper developmental ex-perience. One proposal would be the perception of sub-jects’ brain states (one’s own and others’) whilst simulta-neously interacting with those subjects (either socially orpurely causally). Current cognitive neuroscience can be seento be doing this to a limited extent, and perhaps radicalimprovements in the interactivity of imaging setups couldproduce the kinds of experience required. But such a possi-bility seems remote: imagine trying to do something similarwith a unfamiliar computer: manipulating the computer andthen observing the physical effects with some low-level in-strument, such as an oscilloscope, or even reading bit stringswith perfect precision. It seems too much of a jump for oneto be able to relate what one is seeing to what one is doing,given that we have not been evolved to do so. A better un-derstanding of the computer would be gained by acquiringthe relevant concepts of computational organisation throughdesigning and building relevant computational systems.
This example suggests that a better candidate for the kindof interaction that will bring about conceptual developmentconcerning consciousness is the attempt to design and buildconscious systems, or models of such, and observe themworking (or failing to!). Here, at last, we reach the fieldof engineering.
2. DIRECTION 2: THE PHILOSOPHER INTHE MACHINE
We are a part of the systems we build; we are an inte-gral part of their functioning and evolution. It follows thatjust as interaction can have a crucial, beneficial effect on thephilosopher, so also can it have such an effect on the systembeing designed or built. A concrete example of this is thecase of Kismet, an anthropomorphic robot being constructedby Breazeal and her colleagues at MIT. Kismet learned tovisually track objects, but it could only do so if trained onsuitable stimuli. This required a trainer to move objects infront of Kismet at a certain speed, distance, etc. Breazealand her collagues found that an efficient way to keep theseparameters within the necessary range was to exploit theaffective responses in the trainer. Kismet was programmedto move back suddenly and raise its eyebrows if the stimulusgot too close to be of effective use during training. Withouthaving to being instructed or deliberate, the inbuilt socialresponse of the trainer to such a display was to readjustthe object position, putting it back into the effective range.Thus Kismet’s ability to learn appropriately was the resultof how it affected the trainer, and how this effect in turnaffected Kismet. The trainer was a part of the learning sys-tem. The suggestion for philosophy and engineering is thatthis dynamic might also occur on the conceptual level, withconceptual advances on the part of the philosopher/theoristleading to new insights and concepts, in turn leading to newdesigns and modes of interaction.
This suggests that instead of trying to design an AI/machineconsciousness in one step, as is usually done, a more dy-namically staggered design might have a greater change ofsuccess. That is, a philosopher/engineer P/E1 could designa system S1 so that it will prompt conceptual changes inthe philosopher/engineer (now P/E2) that will enable P/E2
to design a system S2 that will in turn result in P/E3...that will eventually produce not only a system Sn that hasthe desired properties, but will also yield an enlightenedP/En with an understanding of consciousness that we lowlyP/E1s cannot now grasp. (This could be seen as the poten-tially more plausible converse of a dynamic that has alreadyreceived some attention: that of developing an artificial in-telligence to a point where it can begin to assist in the designiteration itself.)
Perhaps it is not too far-fetched to suggest that some-thing like this dynamic, this designing for conceptual change,could be happening now. It can be seen not only in worklike Kismet, but also in the search for creativity-enhancingtechnologies: environments, document systems, brain-waveinduction devices etc. that facilitate insight and creative ad-vance. If such techniques were to be tuned in such a way thatthey formed an integral part of an AI research project, thenperhaps some current limitations, on both our engineeringcapabilities and our philosophical, conceptual understand-ing, could be overcome.
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The Importance of Engineering to Philosophy Dazhou Wang
Graduate University, Chinese Academy of Sciences Room 111, Humanity Building, 19A Yuquan Road
Beijing 100049, China 0086-10-88256360
Keywords Engineering, philosophy, philosophy of engineering
In his stirring article entitled “the important of philosophy to engineering”, Carl Mitcham gave us three reasons to answer the question why philosophy is important to engineering [1]. In this paper, building on his and several other scholars’ insight, I simply try to answer a question in the other direction as a complement to understanding of relationships between engineering and philosophy, which is “why engineering is important to philosophy?”
The argument is that engineering is important to philosophy for at least four reasons. First, engineering is a critical object for philosophical reflections. Engineering is a sort of homestead-building activities, represented human wisdom, ideals and values. It is through engineering practice that useful artifacts and artificial systems that heretofore did not exist have been brought to reality. An account of how highly technological materiality has evolved, and how it both constrains and allows for the pursuit of human ideal, is surely a central task of philosophers [2]. The very life of philosophy exactly roots in this real man-made world. To some extent, whether philosophy matters or not is associated with its account of and impact on engineering practices.
Second, engineering can function as a thinking laboratory of philosophers to test their philosophical arguments. Examples of several philosophical theses concerning technology and engineering substantiate this point. Such arguments as technology’s being “Gestell”, becoming “autonomous”, and reined by instrumental rationality, simply could not hold, had they been tested with engineering practices [3-4]. In fact, being associated inseparably with moralities, engineering is “humanity in action” [5]. Engineering is not only subjected to instrumental rationality, but also to communicative rationality. There are always alternatives to certain engineering design, and the idea of “only one best solution” to the engineering problem is just an illusion.
Third, philosophy can learn to be modest and prudent following the example of engineering. Philosophy represents a pursuit of certainty, necessity and universal truth. In comparison, the world of engineering is characterized by local, situated, specific and contingent knowledge and choices. Contrary to common presumptions, philosophy is far more ambitious and arrogant than engineering in dealing with the real world. Historically speaking, most of the atrocities and disasters resulted from philosophy-based ideologies rather than from engineering failure. The large scale totalitarian social engineering stemmed more from fancies of philosophers than that of engineers [6]. In this sense, philosophers should turn to
engineers for some insight who “produce startling new projects for achieving the greatest happiness of the greatest number” [7].
Fourth and the last reason is that, “engineering is philosophy” [1], through engineering, philosophy will become more itself. In fact, one of important aims of philosophy is to reveal alternatively possible ways of life, and one of fundamental functions of engineering is to realize such possibilities, and at the same time to open more new possibilities. In this sense, the ideal of philosophy and that of engineering are very similar to each other, and the creativity in philosophy can be paralleled to that of engineering. With the emergence of meta-technology [8], the relations between engineering and philosophy are deepening and getting closer, and engineering is of increasing significance to philosophy. It will be a major mistake to dismiss engineering practices as marginal to the analysis and reflection of philosophy.
In sum, although there are historical roots responsible for philosophers’ ignorance to engineering, engineering still is of central importance to philosophy. To study philosophy of engineering [9] is to study philosophy of action and philosophy in general. In other words, philosophy of engineering is not so much a branch of philosophy among the family of philosophies as the philosophy itself.
REFERENCES [1] Mitcham, C. 1998 The Importance of Philosophy to
Engineering. Tecnos, Vol.XVII(3). [2] Borgmann, Albert, 1995 Does Philosophy Matter.
Technology in Society 17(3): 295-309. [3] Winner, L. 1977 Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-
of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
[4] Latour, B. 1996 Aramis or the Love for Technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
[5] Pitt, J. C. 2000 Thinking about Technology: Foundations of the Philosophy of Technology. NY: Seven Bridges Press.
[6] Popper, K. 1945 Open society and its enemies. London: Routledge.
[7] Rorty, R. 1991 Essays on Heidegger and Others. New York: Cambridge University Press.p.26.
[8] Mitcham, C. 1995 Notes toward a Philosophy of Meta-Technology. Techné , Vol. 1, 1/2, Fall.
[9] Li, Bocong 2002 Introduction to Philosophy of Engineering. Zhengzhou: Henan: Daxiang Press.
79
A Critique on CritiqueKees Pieters
University for HumanisticsDrift 6,
3500 AT Utrecht, The Netherlands
+31 30 239 0100
ABSTRACT
When reflecting on the pace of progress of the past thirty years or
so, especially in Computer and Information Science, the area of
my professional training and work, one is quite soon confronted
with the huge gap between the positivist belief in progress from
the practitioners and the concerns and critiques of the observers of
the fruits of the work of these practitioners.
From the perspectives of the latter, technology is often a monster
that needs taming, and engineers and (other) practitioners need to
be made aware of the potential hazards of their inventions and
discoveries for the world we live in (Irrgang 2007).
This gap is as ancient as technology itself, I suppose, and it
probably varies with culture. A lot of literature in my research
area are of (anglo-)American origins, and usually breathe certain
lightness about the consequences of technological advance
(Collins 2003). When I do read (Continental) European
contributions, the tone tends to be more sombre and often refutes
such an attitude as being naive and simpleminded- in fact, there is
often certain condescendence about practioners that are happily
doing their research and making their thingies, seemingly
unworried about the possibility that the stuff they make may ruin
the globe, human existence or have other far-reaching devastating
consequences in the (near) future.
Surprisingly enough, this attitude is often not countered by the
practitioners themselves. They appear blissfully unaware of the
critiques that, upon closer examination, often circulate amongst
incrowds only and hardly makes its way to the forums that the
practitioners themselves consult. Besides this, critique is often
used as a mere style figure that emanates certain intellectuality
while, in fact the articles are nothing more than ‘negated naivety’,
usually covered with a plethora of fancy words and extensive
references to long-dead thinkers that contrast starkly with the
usually clear, business-like structure of technological papers.
There is a unbalance in the attitude of observers on technology on
one side, and the indifference of these practitioners to their critics
on the other, and I don’t need an extensive analysis on literature
to support this observation. One only needs to look at the
programme of the 2007 Workshop on Philosophy & Engineering
to see what I mean. The three tracks of this workshop are
‘Philosophy’, ‘Philosophical Reflections of Practitioners’ and
‘Ethics’. So where are the tracks ‘Engineering’, ‘Engineering
Perspectives on Philosophy’ and ‘Practices’, to name a few
possible additions from an engineering point of view?
Before continuing, it may be worthwhile to address the reason
why the author of this article has a certain sensitivity for this
issue. As was mentioned previously, I have a background in
electro-technical engineering and computer science, with a strong
interest for the largely mutli-disciplinary disciplines related to
complex systems theory and (artificial) intelligence. As a matter of
coincidence, I am currently engaged in a phd research for the
NWO programme ‘The Societal Component of the Genomics
Debate’ (NWO 2001), which addresses the impact of genome
research on society in general and, in the case of the project I
partake in, on the more or less immediate stakeholders of this
particularly volatile technology in ethical sense. This project,
‘Towards a Lingua Democratica on the Genomics Debate’ (NWO
2003) is coordinated from the Utrecht-based University for
Humanistics (UH).
Not only does this research (currently half-way) confront me with
the differences between the world of (commercial) engineering I
worked in for the past seventeen years or so, and that of ‘applied
philosophy’, as I tend to regard the goals and intentions of the
UH, it is actually also the core issue that is addressed in the
research itself. Lingua Democratica is a term poised by my
promotor, Harry Kunneman, to describe means of interaction
between different stakeholders (of genomics) that lead to enduring
and valuable coalitions rather than factions in this debate. And
two very important stakeholders are scientists and genetic
engineers on one side, while the other side consists of ethicists
and philosophers who ponder on the ethical consequences of
genomics for our lives and our future [5].
I have been in a unique position where ‘engineering meets
philosophy’, but have seen very few examples where philosophy
truely tries to ‘meet engineering’1. If amends need to be made, it
is the engineer who is required to make them, if someone is found
wanting, it is usually the practitioners of technology. If
observations and reflection on technology are required, then
philosophers readily take the front rows to watch the lab rabbits of
technology do their thing [7].
However, there are a lot of interesting observations that can be
made when looking at philosophy from an engineering
perspective. One can draw focus on the luxury of being able to
1 A philosopher who does manage to bridge this gap is, for
instance, Daniel Dennet [3], who follows strong causal lines of
reasoning with strong connotations to what engineers and hard
scientists are used to.
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reflect on this topic (and usually being paid to do so) without
being hindered by the time-consuming obligations of producing
technology, keeping up-to-date with new technology and meeting
deadlines and customer demands. One can raise questions about
the methodology of established philosophical traditions, and
whether these are sufficient to effectively address the expectations
and mindsets of engineers, especially those who need to be
convinced on the importance of reflection on their work. One can
wonder if down-to-earth research in, for instance, the neuro-
sciences [8,9] is providing more profound answers to existential
questions that have troubled generations of philosophers.
Of course, none of these questions can be answered with a quick
and easy yes or no, and the intention of this paper is far from the
desire to answer them. Instead, it would like to draw attention to
established mindsets, expectations and intrinsic characteristics,
even emotions, of various disciplines and practitioners that
surface in any interdisciplinary enterprise. Characteristics that are
currently analysed at the University of Humanistics as aspects of a
‘Lingua Democratica’.
The fact is that different disciplines use different forms of
language, but also engage in interactions that tend to be self-
referential and self-describing, thereby often implicitly closing the
interaction space with other disciplines. The lingua democratica
tries to identify common processes that occur, in the hope that
awareness of these processes may help to break them open and
support interactions that go beyond the in-crowd. These processes
also emerge within the research group itself, that includes a
sociologist, ethicist, biologist and, as was mentioned earlier, an
engineer.
The contribution from engineering tries to describe the Lingua
Democratica in terms of patterns that have first been identified in
neural networks or agent systems, and find equivalents in the
neur-sciences but also with established systems theoretical
research in the humanities by social theorists as Niklas Luhmann
[10] and many others.
These efforts invite, and require, a certain equality or balance in
the various parties who engage in such interdisciplinary efforts,
and which can only be fully understood when those parties are
aware of the processes that normally take place amongst them.
This paper aims to introduce these aspects of the Lingua
Democratica in a way that is both support for the notion that
engineering practices provide valuable knowledge that can have
its worth outside the domains where it is traditionally applied, as
means for philosophy to reflect on their role as observers of
technology and technologists.
1. TRACK
Philosophical Reflections of Practitioners
2. REFERENCES
[1] “Visions of Technology”, Irrgang, Ubiquity: Volume 8, Issue
10, 2007
[2] “A vision for the future of genomics research”, Collins et.
al., Nature, Vol 422 2003
[3] “De maatschappelijke component van het Genomics
Onderzoek”, NWO 2001
[4] “Towards a lingua democratica for the public debate on
genomics”, NWO 2003
[5] “Human Germline Genetic Modification: Issues and Options
for Policymakers”, Baruch et. al., Genetics and PublicPolicy Center, 2005
[6] “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea”, Daniel Dennet, Touchstone
1995
[7] “Programme Netherlands Genomics initiative”, NWO, 29
november 2006
[8] “Consciousness”, Guilio Tononi & Gerald Edelman, Penguin
2003
[9] “Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain”
Antonio Damassio, Harcourt 2003
[10] “Social Systems”, Niklas Luhmann, Stanford University
Press, 1995
81
The Dialectic of the Good in Heuristic Optimization An Example from the Automotive Industry
Albrecht Fritzsche TU Darmstadt
64283 Darmstadt, Germany [email protected]
Keywords Soft Computing, Heuristic Optimization, Philosophy of Technology, Bounded Rationality, Genetic Algorithms, Dialectic, Hegel, Representation, Theories of Action.
1. THE GAP TO THE REAL WORLD In the first decades of the twentieth century, the theory of optimization slowly started to evolve into a separate field of mathematical research [1]. The first applications to economic planning problems like vehicle routing and production scheduling appeared a few years later. After that it did not take very long until all major companies started to base their important decisions on the formal examination of the expected benefit from the separate alternatives. At the same time, Herbert Simon introduced the notion of Bounded Rationality to mark the missing link to the human perspective in real life [2], [3]. He stated that human decisions in the real world are never based on the calculation of an optimal solution with respect to a given benefit function. Human rationality is bounded; there is no full formal representation of any real world situation it could refer to, and certainly no way to evaluate all possible alternatives for decision. Economic theory continued to develop more and more sophisticated techniques to calculate optimal solutions to decision problems within their own formal framework. The human perspective on real world problems is left outside. However, with the rising complexity of the planning tasks, new scenarios emerge right within the formal framework of economy showing similar characteristics as real word situations.
2. VEHICLE ORDER SCHEDULING This paper discusses a practical example for this
phenomenon from the planning process for vehicle production in the automotive industry [4]. The final step of this process is the order release in the plant, during which the vehicle orders are scheduled for production. Since order release is the last addition to the planning, the data structures of the representation usually reach at this moment their finest granularity. Different order characteristics can affect the manufacturing process quite deeply. A paint shop, for example, shows higher efficiency if it can paint vehicles of the same colour in a row, while extras like sun roof cause additional work in the body shop which is easier to handle if it can be distributed evenly throughout the day [5],[6]. The vehicle order release in the plant has therefore the main objective to find an optimal sequence with respect to the manufacturing efforts caused by the orders under the constraints established from sales distribution and parts delivery during the previous planning steps. Ordering a premium car, the customer can today choose from a large variety of different options. The probability to find two vehicles in the current order volume with exactly the same characteristics is therefore extremely small. In most cases, the space of possible production sequences therefore also
contains hardly any two elements causing the same manufacturing effort. Calculating each single production sequence and the effort it causes is far beyond reach of even the fastest electronic processor. In consequence, the optimization in order release faces the problem that there is no way to gain a complete overview over all possible solutions.
3. THE REPRESENATION PROBLEM Operations research has addressed this problem quite
extensively during the last decades. It has developed heuristic methods like Genetic Algorithms and Simulated Annealing which can approximate the optimum on such solution spaces quite well. These methods are commonly subsumed under the term "soft computing". In his 1991 article, Rodney Brooks has described such methods as "intelligence without representation" [7]. Brooks states that the power of soft computing derives from the very fact that it does not allow us to understand why the calculation proceeds in the way it does. Only by leaving unclear for us what is going on, it can achieve better results that other way of computing.
4. SOFT COMPUTING IN PRACTICE Methods of soft computing have widely been introduced to
support the optimization of the order release in the automotive industry. However, they can only solve a part of the problem. Since the manufacturing effort during production emerges in lots of different locations along the conveyor belts, the lack of overview over the solution space does not only affect the identification of the best solution, but also the notion of what is best. All different efforts can be measured separately, but without access to all solutions, there is no reliable basis for their combination. Nobody knows how much benefit can be achieved for the separate manufacturing efforts before the optimization took place. Just like in a real world scenario, there is no firm, predefined evaluation function available. In practice, the optimization in order release is therefore usually performed several times in a row. Every time, the settings for measuring of the benefit of the solutions is changed according to the information about what can be achieved from the antecedent optimization run.
5. A DIALECTIC INTERPRETATION One way to understand such a situation can be based on
Hegelian dialectics [8]. According to Hegel, formal structures appear first as imaginations in the consciousness to prepare an action. During the action, the consciousness experiences that the formal structures are disturbed. They do not fit to the real world situation. With the reflection of the conflict between imagination and real world, the human is able to gain insight into his own consciousness and his situation. Thus the human uses formal structures to organize himself. In our example, the experience is the identification of a preferred solution by the algorithm according to some preliminary benefit function. The shape of this solution contradicts the expectation of what could
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be achieved on which the preliminary benefit function was based. That way, the planning person learns more about the situation and repeats the optimization with different parameters.
6. REAL LIFE METAPHORS What we see in this example is how the notion of what is
good develops in a dialectic process. Objective and result of the optimization are co-dependent. By the continuous reflection about their relation, the order release is developed. For the description of the way the reflection proceeds, we suggest some metaphors from social processes by including human actors in the evolutionary concept which is commonly used in soft computing. Humans meddle with evolution, e.g. by altering the selection procedures, introducing tools to generate new solutions and establishing specific breeding environments. On such background, the practical usage of soft computing can be understood as an indication the real world quality of the order release scenario.
7. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This paper is the result of a long lasting cooperation with the logistics departments of the Mercedes-Benz production plants in Sindelfingen, Bremen, Rastatt and elsewhere.
8. REFERENCES [1] Schrijver, A. 2005: On the history of combinatorial
optimization (till 1960). In. Aardal et al. (eds): Handbook of Discrete Optimization Elsevier, Amsterdam, 2005, 1-68.
[2] Simon, H.A. 1956 Rational Choice and the structure of environments. Psych. Rev. 63:129-138.
[3] Gigerenzer, G. & Selten, R. (eds.) 2002: Bounded Rationality: the Adaptive Toolbox. Cambridge, MIT press.
[4] Nguyen, A 2003: Car Sequencing Problem. 2006/4/7: http://www.prism.uvsq.fr/~vdc/ROADEF/CHALLENGES/2005/challenge2005_en.html
[5] Epping, Th. 2004: Color Sequencing. Cottbus. [6] Spiekerman S. 2002: Neue Lösungsansätze für
ausgewählte Planungsprobleme in Automobilrohbau und -lackiererei. Aachen.
[7] Brooks, R. 1991: Intelligence without Representation. Artificial Intelligence 47, S.139-159.
[8] Hegel, G.W:F. 1807. Phänomenologie des Geistes. (A) IV. Bamberg, Würzburg 1807.
83
Engineering, Technology, and our disciplinary Self-image
Steffen Koch C/o Institute for Advanced Studies on Science, Technology and Society (IAS-STS); Kopernikusgasse 9; 8010
Graz; Austria [email protected]
Keywords Engineering, technology, interdisciplinarity, STS-studies, self-image
1. CONTEXT The question, what engineering is about seems to be a question easy to answer – at least in comparison to several other disci-plines, such as sociology or philosophy. An answer – from an engineering perspective – can make widely use of the fact that the outcome of engineering work is visible almost everywhere, and, that there is no doubt about the numerous influences tech-nology has today.
But, and in spite of aimed at serving the needs of people and making the world an even richer, healthier, more comfortable place, engineering projects are today more and more subject to considerable controversy. ‘Beyond engineering’ technology is considered to be the outcome of a co-evolutionary process or even a socially constructed matter. Technology in this regard is conceptualized as a ‘configuration-that-works’ rather than single or systematically arranged artifacts. What is more, recently and from a social science perspective a so far unknown ‘species’ of engineer has been spotted – the so called “reflexive engineer”. And, as Robbins [1] suggests, reflexive engineers would be able to serve peoples needs even more “effectively” than “traditional engineers”. As a major reason for that “a much more integrated view of socio-technical systems” has been identified. The process of becoming reflexive, however, took place in a certain field of practice, and after the original engineering education. Experiencing how the literal engineering approach failed made (some) traditionally educated engineers “think about social issues more deeply” and see “their place in the world a little more clearly”.
These are just two incidents which might make someone think about the relationship between engineering and technology. Do we (engineers) need another approach to technology? – might be one question which comes up in this regard. Along with this rather rhetorical question a second one becomes virulent and this addresses the direction of this presentation: Will, while adapting to a different approach towards technology, such obvious dependency between engineering and the outcome of engineering work lead to changes in engineering itself? Or, the other way around: Is for a different concept of technology a transformed approach towards engineering needed?
2. OBJECT OF INVESTIGATION This presentation builds on literature in Science and Technology Studies (STS), as well as my own research as an engineer working in an interdisciplinary context on water related issues of urban settlements. It aims at making sure of the problematic Robbins identified as crucial in practical settings: reflexivity makes a difference to engineering in a beneficial
way. Furthermore it will be discussed, in what way engineering education could make a contribution to gain reflexivity.
First, both the concept of traditional as well as reflexive engi-neering will be introduced. In this regard differences in engi-neering thinking as well as consequences for engineering practice need to be pointed out. Second, and using some insights from a historical case study (about the ‘career of rainwater’; as one recent development of urban water infrastructures and object of my own research) potential contributions to engineering thinking will be analyzed. To investigate transformation processes a historical and socio-technical perspective is used. In conclusion it will be discussed in which dimension those insights might contribute to a more reflexive perspective of engineering scholars.
3. ARGUMENTATION An ‘inherent consciousness’ for the societal context in which engineering work takes place and technological solution must suit seems to be vital, as soon as technologies become more complex. Practical experience will certainly contribute to a broader perspective, but they need to be linked to concepts in theory. A too narrow focus on natural and engineering science during engineering education leads obviously to a limited accessibility for different perspectives (‘technology as applied natural science’) and should therefore be avoided; engineering is required to be ‘applied social science’ too. Adapting to a more “reflexive perspective” after being educated traditionally would be a rather reactive measure to cope with an experienced inability than an active contribution to solve a current problem of a society. As Robbins study revealed indirectly too, trying to ‘rehabilitate’ traditionally educated engineers might even not be successful.
The argument is that, already during engineering education a contribution to keep and to stimulate consciousness for societal issues can be made. Including far more knowledge into engi-neering education, however, seems to be not realistic; otherwise the question about what could be left out would arise. But, increased interdisciplinary teamwork – in a broader sense – is a promising way to make those insights available and to contribute to more reflexivity of engineering. Science and Technology Studies (STS), for instance, and as the case study suggests, would in this regard be a rewarding component of a “milieu interne” [2] of engineering. Therefore, the basic orientation with the following concerns is a crucial prerequisite; first and foremost this implies: to broaden the notion of technology generally shared among engineers to socio-technical systems, and to make engineers acquainted with fundamental concepts to lay the ground for successful interdisciplinary participation.
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REFERENCES [1] Robbins, P. 2007. The Reflexive Engineer: Perceptions of
Integrated Development. Journal of International Develop-ment 19, 1(2007), 75-82.
[2] Stichweh, R. 2007. Einheit und Differenz im Wissen-schaftssystem der Moderne [Unity and difference in the
system of sciences]. In Zwei Kulturen der Wissenschaft – revisited [The two cultures of science - revisited], Half-mann, J. and J. Rohbeck, Eds. Velbrück Wissenschaft, Weilerswist, 213-228.
85
Human-Centred Design – An Other View Marc Steen
TNO Information and Communication Technology PO Box 5050
2600 GB Delft, The Netherlands +31(0)15-2857277
marc.steen-at-tno.nl
ABSTRACT This paper is about human-centred design (HCD). It is argued that there are two tensions fundamental to HCD: 1) the tension of combining the contributions of researchers/designers versus those of end-users; and 2) the tension of combining the concerns for a current versus a future situation. Several ideas of philosophers Levinas and Derrida, their ideas about other and otherness, are applied to look differently at HCD and to explore the ethical qualities of doing HCD.
Keywords Human-Centred Design, Principles, Practice, Ethics.
1. INTRODUCTION This paper is part of my PhD research project in which I study one human-centred design (HCD) project in which I work myself. My role is hybrid and somewhat ambivalent: with one hand I practice and advocate HCD and with another I study two HCD projects critically and draw attention to the difficulty of doing HCD. The goal of my research is to provide an alternative story about HCD. I wish to “deconstruct” [3] HCD, to open its “open the black box” [7], in order to explore the ethical qualities of doing HCD.
2. HUMAN-CENTRED DESIGN The principles of HCD appear to be simple: 1) the active involvement of users for a clear understanding of user and task requirements; 2) an appropriate allocation of functions between users and technology; 3) iteration of design and evaluation processes; and 4) and a multi-disciplinary approach [5]. Researchers and designers who do HCD attempt to come out of their “ivory tower” to interact with (future, potential) end-users “out there”. The goal of such cooperation is to articulate better user requirements, which, in turn, lead to products or services which better match end-users’ needs and preferences [6].
However, it is not easy to bring these principles into practice. My participant observation in two HCD projects provides several examples for this. In one project [12] we cooperated with police officers as (future, potential) end-users; we did several observations and a number of workshops with them. Each such interaction resulted in a gradual shift of the project’s goal and focus. This is thought to be good practice in HCD: end-users influence upon the project. However, it is also shown how we unintentionally missed several chances to learn about police work, because of our focus on developing and evaluating an innovative telecom service. We could, for example, have listened better to police officers talking (during lunch) about not wanting to wear new woolen trousers, which management wants them to wear. Such stories can tell something about police officers’ professional identities and how management and innovation work within the police. In the other project [11] we cooperated with informal carers as (future, potential) end-users. In this project cooperation between team members was difficult. We did several seemingly redundant activities;
interviews and workshops were conducted several times and decision making was slow. This was probably caused by the different project team members’ approaches: some draw from social science and are concerned with describing a current situation; whereas others have design backgrounds and are concerned with envisioning future situations. Furthermore, the end-users were mostly not allowed to participate themselves; they were represented instead, by the different project team members.
Here are two fundamental difficulties and associated tensions within HCD, in a nutshell: 1) the difficulty of organizing cooperation between researchers/designers and end-users and the tension of combining their respective contributions to the project – this is the difficulty of researchers/¬designers to be open towards end-users and to learn from them [10]; and 2) the difficulty of creating a novel design and the tension of combining the concerns for a current versus a future situation – this is the difficulty to envision a future situation based on what happens in the present, the difficulty to invent [4].
Based on a literature study of several HCD methods it is suggested that these tensions are fundamental to many (if not all) HCD methods, such as participatory design, ethnographic fieldwork, the lead user approach, contextual design, co-design and empathic design, and that different methods seek to solve these difficulties and tensions differently [13].
3. AN OTHER VIEW I would like to suggest looking at these tensions from a philosophical perspective, by drawing selectively from the ideas of French philosophers Levinas and Derrida.
I propose to look at the difficulty of researchers and designers to be open towards end-users and to learn from them via Levinas’ idea of the “grasp”. Levinas suggests that when I gather knowledge I tend to reduce everything to concepts that I am already familiar with. I “transmute” every Other, for example an end-user and what he or she tells me, into the Same, into my own way of thinking and the ideas which I already have [8, pp. 11-13]:
“The knowing I is the melting pot of such a trans¬mutation. It is the Same par excellence. When the Other enters into the horizon of knowledge, it already renounces alterity. […] the I of knowledge is […] the melting pot where every Other is transmuted into the Same.”
When I gather knowledge from or about another person, I grasp what I see and hear of that other person, and pull that into my own world, into my own framework – “knowledge remains linked to perception and to apprehension and to the grasp even in the concept or the Begriff, which retains or recalls the concreteness of the grasp” [9, p. 152].
Furthermore, I propose to look at the difficulty of envisioning a future situation, of making design decisions which must lead to an innovative design. Derrida argued that only in a situation
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without rules, where one cannot use knowledge or apply rules, can one make a genuine decision [2, pp. 147-8]:
“The only decision possible is the impossible decision. It is when it is not possible to know what must be done, when knowledge is not and cannot be determining that a decision is possible as such. Otherwise, the decision is an application: one knows what has to be done, it’s clear, there is no more decision possible; what one has here is an effect, an application, a programming.”
Derrida argued that invention cannot happen via programming or the application of rules; such would only result in “invention of the same” [1, p. 55]. True invention can only happen if we try to be open towards otherness, if we “prepare for it”, if we “allow the coming of the entirely other”, and this requires a kind of passivity – “No doubt the coming of the other, if it has to remain incalculable and in a certain way aleatory (one happens onto the other in the encounter), escapes from all programming [1, p. 55-6].
My references to Levinas and Derrida are meant to draw attention to the ethics of doing HCD. With “ethics” I do not mean to talk about what is morally good or bad, and certainly not to prescribe what to do. I would like to argue that doing HCD has ethical qualities, not that doing HCD is good or bad, and not that there are good or bad ways to do HCD. The meaning of “ethics” which I wish to invoke is that of ethics which happens in-between people, as something which happing already. My suggestion is that practitioners of HCD, like me, can become more aware of or explicit about such ethical qualities when we do HCD.
I feel attracted to the suggestion of Van de Poel andVerbeek [14] to talk about engineering ethics based on empirical, specific and contextualized studies of engineering or practice. And, if I open the “black box” of my HCD practice, I don’t see an empty box, but a box full of ethics [15].
4. RELEVANCE I would like to revisit the original ambition of HCD: researchers and designers come out of their ivory tower and interact with end-users in order to learn mutually and to jointly create innovations. However, in our attempts to learn together with end-users we tend to make grasping gestures, we destroy the other’s otherness – and learn nothing which we did not know yet. And in our attempts to organize a project and to make progress we apply all sorts of rules, we try to program invention – and cannot create anything out-of-the-box, out of our own rules and programs. I see HCD as fragile: I see it’s principles as beautiful, and I see its practice as vulnerable. I would like to explore how this “other” view on HCD (outlined above) may help to bridge the gap between principles and practice.
My proposal is to continue to do HCD, but differently: more aware and explicit about its ethical qualities.
5. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My PhD/DBA research is part of the Freeband Communication research programme and is sponsored by TNO Information and Communication Technology. I would like to thank my fellow project team members for their kind cooperation in my research.
6. REFERENCES [1] Derrida, J., "Psyche: Inventions of the Other," in Reading
de Man Reading. L. Waters and W. Godzich, Eds. Menneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
[2] Derrida, J., Points: Interviews, 1974-1994. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.
[3] Derrida, J., "Letter to a Japanese friend [original 1987]," in A Derrida reader: Between the blinds. P. Kamuf, Ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991, pp. 270-276.
[4] Haddon, L. and Kommonen, K.-H., "Interdisciplinary explorations: A dialogue between a sociologist and a design group," University of Art and Design, Helsinki, 2003.
[5] ISO, ISO 13407: Human-Centred Design Processes for Interactive Systems. Geneva: ISO, 1999.
[6] Kujala, S., "User involvement: a review of the benefits and challenges," Behaviour and Information Technology, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 1-17, Jan.2003.
[7] Latour, B., Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987.
[8] Levinas, E., "Transcendence and height [original 1962]," in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic philosophical writings. A. Peperzak, S. Critchley, and R. Bernasconi, Eds. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996, pp. 11-32.
[9] Levinas, E., "Transcendence and intelligibility [original 1984]," in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic philosophical writings. A. Peperzak, S. Critchley, and R. Bernasconi, Eds. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996, pp. 149-159.
[10] Muller, M. J., "Participatory Design: The third space in HCI," in The human-computer interaction handbook: fundamentals, evolving technologies and emerging applications. J. Jacko and A. Sears, Eds. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002, pp. 1051-1068.
[11] Steen, M., ""Our need is to do something about that problem" -- Studying how researchers and developers interact with informal carers during an innovation project," 2006.
[12] Steen, M., ""We don't want woollen trousers" -- Studying how researchers and developers interact with police officers during an innovation project,". R. ten Bos and R. Kaulingfreks, Eds. 2006, pp. 644-666.
[13] Steen, M., Kuijt-Evers, L., and Klok, J., "Early user involvement in research and design projects – A review of methods and practices," 2007.
[14] Van de Poel, Ibo and Peter-Paul Verbeek, "Ethics and engineering design," Science Technology & Human Values, 2006, 31(3), pp. 223-36.
[15] Winner, Langdon (1993), "Upon opening the black box and finding it empty: Social constructivism and the philosophy of technology," Science Technology & Human Values, 18(3), 362-78.
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Ethics and Engineering EducationLouis L. Bucciarelli
MIT author of Designing Engineers and Engineering Philosophy
ABSTRACT ABET recommends the study of ethics so that students acquire “an understanding of professional and ethical responsibility”. For the most part, teaching of the subject relies upon the use of scenarios - both hypothetical and “real”- and open discussion framed by the codes. These scenarios and this framing strike me as seriously deficient - lacking in their attention to the complexities of context, almost solely focused on individual
agency, while reflecting too narrow and simplistic a view of the responsibilities of the practicing engineer. A critique of several exemplary scenarios, and consideration of the demands placed upon today’s professional, prompt reflection on the need for, not just a more expansive reading of the codes of ethics re what it might mean to be “responsible”, but a substantial reform of undergraduate engineering education across the board..
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Ethical aspects of technical artifacts The Significance of Collective Responsibility
Ryoji Fujimoto Graduate School of Letters,
Hokkaido University Kita, 10 Nishi, 7 Kitaku
Sapporo, Japan. [email protected]
ABSTRACT What are technical artifacts? The technological developments of the past century have made this question more pressing than ever. “The dual nature of technical artifacts” approach, which is investigated at the Delft University of Technology, is one of the most noteworthy options to provide a definitive answer.
In this approach, a technical artifact is analyzed according to the two natures it has: the physical nature and the intentional nature. Whereas the physical aspects of a technical artifact can be described without any reference to human intentions, its intentional aspects are closely to the intentionality of design processes. This understanding of technical artifacts combines two fundamentally different views of our world: technical artifacts can only be described adequately in a way that somehow combines the physical and intentional aspects of the world.
But, it is difficult to figure out the framework that combines the physical and intentional aspects of technical artifacts. And, what the designer or engineer has to do is to find a physical nature for the artifact design that fits the desired intentional nature. In practice finding the association between these two natures can already be a challenge for engineers. The influential strategy to conceive of the dual nature of technical artifacts is to regard the notion of a technical function as a bridging concept that relates the physical and intentional domain. Pieter Vermaas and Wybo Houkes provide convincing arguments for this idea. Their notion of a use plan is a valuable innovation and their action-theoretical account of using and designing artifacts via use plans is attracting a lot of attention. At the same time, some people claim that their account of technical function downplays the notion of sociality. Technical functions cannot be understood in complete abstraction from the social context because they are in part socially constituted.
I acknowledge the significance of social factors. However, the notion of sociality is ambiguous in their arguments. To shed light on the significance of sociality in the engineering community, I take particular note of the debate on collectives in which philosophers are engaged. I take up the discussion about collectives for two main reasons.
No one would deny that the pioneer in engineering ethics is the United States. In recent years, Japanese people are highly concerned with issues relating to engineering ethics, and some people are working on general improvement in engineering ethics education. To find an effective way of dealing with ethical problems facing engineers, they have considered various features of engineering ethics in the U.S. In the process, they realized the crucial difference between the two. Engineering ethics in the U.S. has tended to focus on the personal action of individuals. Individual engineers have an important role to play in design processes, and they take a pivotal position where
someone can find and fix a flaw. Therefore, the individual engineer’s responsibility to the public is emphasized in the U.S. Concretely speaking, reflecting the ethical aspect in design processes and the appropriateness of whistle-blowing are chosen as major themes for debates. Behind this trend is the fact that individual engineers in the U.S. are understood as the profession with code of ethics as well as physicians and lawyers.
But, Japan has a shorter history of engineering ethics than the U.S., and the notion of profession among engineers has not become well-established in Japan. As a result, the notion of profession is not fulfilling the function to evaluate the conduct of engineers from an ethical point of view and protect them in the event that he blows the whistle.1 The situation is closely related to the specific circumstances of surrounding Japanese engineers. Most of engineers work as a member of a company in Japan. It is unusual for Japanese engineers to go around the company freely in search of a better environment. It’s like saying that engineers in Japan are controlled by the company to which they belong. In other words, Japanese engineers depend heavily on their company, i.e. “collectives”. Therefore, it’s unreasonable to directly import the concept of individual-based engineering ethics to Japan. In this presentation, I will point the way to construct a Japanese model of engineering ethics.
The above factor that is specific to my country cannot account for all the factors which impel me to develop alternatives to the individualistic ethical approach. We will notice that various people are involved in a production of contemporary technical artifacts. When a technical artifact is produced, we don’t find very many cases in which individual engineers make key decisions for product design. Most engineers work on a team and they use a collective decision-making system rather than individual decision. Moreover, modern science and technology have a wide-ranging impact on our society, and some technical artifacts hold the possibility of changing the shape of our community. Based on this situation, there is growing concern in contemporary societies about locating moral responsibility for widespread or collective harms affecting large numbers of people or entire communities. The manufacture of a defective product is an example of situations in which harm can be extremely widespread. It is extremely difficult for us to specify the particular actions or inactions of individuals that bring about the harm in such case.
After considering these points, individual-based approach alone may not be enough to resolve ethical issues of the day. If we take an individualistic standpoint, we might argue that various 1 I note, however, that a lot of people are undertaking various
efforts to establish the notion of profession among engineers in Japan.
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collective activities in engineering are fully reducible to acts of individuals and that therefore we can tell a complete moral story by remaining at the level of individual agency and responsibility. However, these individualistic views sidestep the essential group character of collective action. Collective action, such as producing technical artifacts, is not simply the aggregation of the acts of individuals. Instead, there is an overarching sense of purpose and joint effort that defines the action and gives it its character as a collective action. I argue that in certain collective action situations, we would not be able to account for the moral dimensions of individuals’ contributions and individual moral responsibility if we disregarded the collective level. The collective level of analysis is relevant and required for an ethically adequate account of these actions.
I will propose to bring the concept of collective responsibility into the existing ethical approach, and devote my main efforts to considering the notion of collective responsibility. Then, we face some ethical and philosophical issues about the collective responsibility. Indeed, the notion of collective responsibility has become the source of some major philosophical controversies. One of the major controversies focuses on the possibility of collective actions. For example, those who are quote “methodological individualists” doubt if collectives can intentionally act. Another controversy places the relationship between collective responsibility and the values of individual liberty at the center of our attention. Is it possible for individual members of a group to be collectively responsible for group-based harms in cases where they did not directly cause it? Defenders of collective responsibility work out a variety of
philosophical strategies to debunk the above claims and to justify the possibility of collective responsibility.
First, I outline the major claims of methodological individualists and shed light on the chief points of controversy. Next, I turn to some arguments of defenders of collective responsibility. I will lay out their noteworthy analyses. Although their analyses are illuminating, I find them wanting in a variety of respects. Then, I make some substantial improvements in their arguments. Finally, I expect to contribute the further development of engineering ethics by proposing the model which incorporates the notion of collective responsibility.
1. REFERENCES [1] Vermaas, P. E. and Houkes, W. 2006. Technical functions:
a drawbridge between the intentional and structural natures of technical artefacts. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science. 37, (2006), 5-18.
[2] Hansson, S. J. 2006. Defining technical function. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science. 37, (2006), 19-22.
[3] Scheele, M. 2006. Function and use of technical artifacts: social conditions of function ascription. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science. 37, (2006), 23-36.
[4] Preston, B. 2006. Social context and artefact function. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science. 37, (2006), 37-41.
[5] Ishihara, K. 2003. A Survey of Textbooks on Engineering Ethics. Journal of Science and Technology Studies, No. 2 (2003), 138-148.
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A Collaborative Platform for Experiments in Ethics and Technology
Peter Danielson Centre for Applied EthicsUniv. of British Columbia
Vancouver, Canada 604-978-1212
ABSTRACTThis paper descr ibes the NERD platform: a web-based research instrument designed to support collaborative experimental research in the ethics of technology. We argue that our web-based methods can provide both ethically and experimentally significant data. While the initial use has been in the area of the ethics of biotechnology, our approach is designed to generalize to any controversial issue with significant technical content and we conclude with an offer of broader collaboration. Spoiler alert: If you plan to participate in our experimental surveys, please visit http://yourviews.ubc.ca before reading this paper.
Categories and Subject DescriptorsK.4.1 [Computing Milieux]: Computers and Society – ethics.
General TermsExperimentation, Human Factors, Legal Aspects
Keywordsethics and technology, social norms, online public consultation
1.INTRODUCTIONMany of the issues in ethics and technology raise empirical questions that we can roughly divide into static and dynamic. 1. Static: how do different groups apply their moral norms (values, principles) to new technologies? 2. Dynamic: what happens when these moral judgments are challenged by expert advice, group influence, or critical reflection? Genomic biotechnology where our research group has worked for the past four years, yields outstanding examples of the first class [1-4]: The difference in the response to genetically modified food in Europe and the U.S. [5] and the difference between judgments about genomics applied to human health and to food [6]. Less is known about the dynamics of these norms. Our research instrument is designed to collect data on both levels but with a special emphasis on the dynamic, hence our team’s name: NERD: Norms Evolving in Response to
Dilemmas. While there are many ways to address these empirical questions (members of our extended research group use focus groups and deliberative events), NERD has developed a unique web-based experimental approach, which we have characterized as “deep, cheap, and improvable” [2]. We have, to date, implemented five surveys, collected data from over one thousand participants, tested online vs. face-to-face methods, collaborated with six other research groups, and developed three prototype platforms, publishing our results in a wide variety of journals.
2.NERD GoalsThe NERD platform has been designed with two proximate goals. First, to provide ethically serious data. This goal reflects the difficulty in constructing surveys and experiments about moral issues. Notoriously, surveys provoke top of head reactions, not serious ethical reflection. The second goal is to support empirically sound experiments, which require random samples for treatment and control groups and the need to collect as much information as we can about participants. For example, we have been led to move from isolated surveys to empanelling participants who take multiple surveys, allowing us to compare a particular (pseudonymous) individual’s response in different experimental contexts.Both goals agree on the need for a cheap, extensible instrument . We need to survey large numbers of participants if our results are to be demographically credible, that is, representative of the morality of real populations. Similarly, we need large numbers to make our experimental results significant and to allow us to test more hypotheses.The two goals also suggest a third, more distant, and normatively attractive goal, which we characterize as “robust reflective equilibrium.” Given an experimental result that suggests a bias, for example, an agent’s decisions may be considered less ethically serious unless that agent is challenged by this data. A practical democratic ethics of technology should provide ways for citizens to explore the normative space of their technological options and to challenge and be challenged by the evaluations made by each other. NERD aspires to build a platform for democratic ethical decision support based on our experimental platform.
3.NERD DesignWeb-Based PlatformWe chose a web-based instrument for a number of reasons: The web is (relatively) anonymous, reaches a broad international
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.
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sample1, and is cheap compared to face to face methods. Web users have the time to consult with, and we have the “space” to provide, a set of varied advisors, expert and lay. Our web platform is scaleable and flexible; after the investment in our first survey, later surveys have inherited reusable templates and techniques. Our content management system supports varied types of surveys (deep with complex advisor networks and simple shallow questions) and experiments. Finally, we can collect a vast amount of both quantitative (choices, advisor use paths, timing) and qualitative (comments) data in a database available (selectively) online to collaborators.
3.2 CollaborationThe NERD platform is designed to facilitate collaboration in several dimensions. First, the collaboration between our research team and subject matter teams is crucial. Our team does not have the expertise in salmon genomics and aquaculture on the one hand, or forestry genomics, on the other, to author credible questions and advisors. Our partners range from science and technology research groups, to social scientists and ethics researchers. These groups, with their different methods, vocabularies, and expectations, have challenged our assumptions, leading to new types of surveys and experiments. Technically, our collaborations have forced us to develop distributed instruments for authoring, monitoring, and analyzing experimental surveys.Second, the NERD group is collaboration between philosophers and social scientists, committed to methods that advance both our agendas . This is reflected in our choice of dynamic problems discussed in section 5.
Third, our participants are also collaborators, especially since we do not pay them. We need to make our surveys interesting to participants (or to their teachers) and we need to motivate participants to return to take additional surveys or to respond to comments on their contributions. Of course, a large issue for our approach is whether such public collaboration requires real decision-making power.
Finally, we collaborate with the Open Source software development community. NERD’s technical goals have outgrown the ability of a small research group to develop the software required. We have built the most recent versions of NERD on the Drupal open-source content management system, which is used by many democratic groups, and so provides innovative tools for voting on issues, evaluating content, and structuring debate.
4.Beyond Bio-ethics and BiotechWhile NERD’s content has to date been focused on biotechnology, an artifact , we conjecture, of our funding. We intend the NERD instrument to be fully general and hope that the current audience can provide feedback and suggestions on how to expand it to include problems in ethics and (non-biological) engineering. In particular, we note that while we work on biotechnology, we do not rely solely on the methods of bioethics for normative guidance. These have their place – as a source of advice – but so too do general ethics, policy analysis, 1 Granted, there is a bias toward English, but we are now
working on a remedy: our Animal Use in Research survey is being translated into Portuguese by Brazilian collaborators.
economics, and less respected “popular voices.” More important, we see these normative approaches as sources of input, leaving open the empirical questions: which (if any) of these sources do people use and how do these interactions influence their ethical judgments.
5.Results & Critical BootstrappingOne strength of our experimental approach is the ability to test our own assumptions. First, our initial hypothesis was that ethical decisions were strongly effected by social norms. We tested this hypothesis in the first two NERD surveys, by exposing a random partition of the participant population to feedback. Second, our first three surveys assumed the importance of (mostly expert) advisors. We are now testing this assumption experimentally. Finally, our new Parallel Ethical Worlds Experiment [7] is designed specifically to test the power of social norms against more universal ethical principles. (The full version of this paper will discuss these cases in detail.)
6.An Invitation to CollaborateOur focus on biotechnology, understandable in light of the heavy funding for this area, nonetheless weakens our research. We need to extend our coverage to non-biological subjects. We invite participants at this conference, as well as readers of this paper, to contact us about collaboration.
7.ACKNOWLEDGMENTSThanks to the NERD research group. This research is funded by Genome Canada for Building a GE3LS Architecture (Burgess & Danielson) and SSHRC for Modeling Moral Mechanisms (Danielson) .
8.REFERENCES[1] Danielson, P. From Artificial Moral ity to NERD: Models,
Experiments, & Robust Reflective Equilibrium. Artificial Life 10: Achievements and Future Challenges for Artificial Life Workshop Proceedings (2006), 45-48.
[2] P. Danielson, R. Ahmad, Z. Bornik, H. Dowlatabadi, E. Levy. Deep, Cheap, and Improvable: Dynamic Democratic Norms & the Ethics of Biotechnology, in Ethics and the Life Sciences , F. Adams, Ed. (PDC Press, Charlottesville, Va, 2007).
[3] Danielson, P., Mesoudi, A., Stanev, R. NERD & Norms: Framework and Experiments. Philosophy of Science (In Press).
[4] Ahmad, R. et al.A Web-based Instrument to Model Social Norms: NERD Design and Results. Integrated Assessment 6 (2006), 9-36.
[5] Gaskell, G., Bauer, M., D., J. , Allum, N. Worlds Apart? The Reception of Genetically Modified Foods in Europe and the U. S. Science 285 (1999), 384-387.
[6] Ahmad, R., Bailey, J., Danielson, P. Analysis of an Innovative Survey Platform: Compar ison of Human Health and Salmon Genomics. Public Understanding of Science (In Press).
[7] Mesoudi, A., Danielson, P. A. Parallel Ethical Worlds: An Experimental Design for Applied Ethics. Centre for Applied Ethics Working Paper (2007).
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Will nano-enabled diagnostics alter the autonomy of agricultural stakeholders?
Johan Evers Centre for Science, Technology and Ethics
Kasteelpark Arenberg 1 bus 2456 B-3001 Heverlee
0032168083
Johan De Tavernier Centre for Science, Technology and Ethics
Kasteelpark Arenberg 1 bus 2456 B-3001 Heverlee
0032169665
ABSTRACT This article deals with technological and ethical reflections on the need for innovation and the impact of implementation of nano-enabled diagnostics in future livestock production. It argues that an ethical desirability assessment of these applications can hook on the experiences with decision making in biomedical ethics. The prima facie principle ‘respect for autonomy’ is an important principle in this decision making process. Nano-enabled diagnostics may become daily routine through dynamic bottom-up and top-down processes that will influence autonomy. Considering the vast potential market for sensors in livestock production, the decrease in cost price and citizens’ right to know about the health status of animals could result in a strong bottom-up push. The need for additional disease control measures from authorities might cause livestock producers to loose the right to know or the right not to know and oblige them via a top-down policy to implement this technology in daily livestock practices imposing the duty to know.
Keywords
Livestock production, Nano-enabled diagnostics, Sustainability, Disease outbreak management
1. INTRODUCTION The last decade, the European Union (EU) has witnessed important animal disease outbreaks such as Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD), Avian Influenza (AI) and Bluetongue (BT) causing significant national and international economic losses, human health risks, animal suffering and creating problems of disposal and compensation. Current disease strategies such as stamping out and preventive vaccination for BSE, FMD, AI and BT with generic and specific challenges of diagnostics, prevention and control have serious shortcomings related to the aspirations of cost-effective disease eradication and animal friendly disease management. Present diagnostics are (still) time-consuming, labour-intensive and post factum analysis of clinical symptoms and disease spreading, which often leave authorities no other option than the choice for the radical stamping out strategy.
Stamping out is the slaughter of all susceptible animals on an infected holding, followed by the disposal of carcasses and potential risk goods and the decontamination of holdings. This procedure is followed in order to deny the access of an infectious agent to other susceptible hosts. It is also often the most cost-effective [1]. Not only the disease eradication campaign can be shorter and achieved for a lower overall cost, but there might be a much shorter waiting period before the country can be recognized as being free of the disease and the export of livestock and animal products may be resumed.
Personal stories of diseases outbreaks such as the BSE crisis in the United Kingdom accentuated the human dimension and the consumer was constructed as the innocent, vulnerable ‘victim’. Government, the farming industry and science were villains [2]. It can be suggested that media coverage with images of open-air pyres, burial grounds or landfill disposal of carcasses and slaughter methods during major animal disease outbreaks significantly contributed to the public outcry for alternative management procedures. Their concerns about current disease management strategies not only included concerns related to environmental vulnerability (e.g. groundwater pollution) and resistance against the culling of susceptible hobby animals and pets in surveillance zones, but also disrespect of animal welfare and questioning of the current procedures of conducting animal husbandry.
Alternative and complementary strategies such as vaccination have been developed against several infectious and contagious agents. Preventive vaccination takes place in advance to the actual disease outbreak, while ring or blanket vaccination occur at the moment of a disease outbreak (emergency vaccination) and/or in the immediate temporal and/or spatial surrounding of the disease outbreak(s). Preventive vaccination for AI and FMD is illegal in the EU for economic reasons. These economic reasons include the costs of manufacturing, distributing and administering the vaccines and the loss of export markets.
2. NANO-ENABLED DIAGNOSTIC TECHNOLOGY Nano-enabled biosensor technology may significantly shorten the diagnosis time. Nanobiotechnology (1 nm = 10-9 meter) is the convergence of engineering and molecular biology and is leading to a new class of multifunctional devices for biological and chemical analysis with better sensitivity, specificity and a higher rate of recognition [3]. Hence, nanotechnology is an enabling technology that is believed to offer far more reliable, fast and inexpensive diagnostic tools. In a not so far future, implantable nano enabled biosensors could be integrated into on-farm sensing systems where the immunological activity of animals is constantly monitored through a network of sensors connected with a central information device. As soon as any disturbance is detected, appropriate measures can be taken by stockholders, veterinarians or competent authorities. On the conceptual level the demands might be clear but on the operational level there are still many scientific and technological uncertainties. Many reasons could be given for the slow biosensor technology transfer from research laboratories to the marketplace: cost, instability of the new technologies, sensitivity issues, quality assurance and instrumentation design [4].
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3. IMPACT OF NANO-ENABLED DIAGNOSTICS ON AUTONOMY Both the ‘right to know’ and the ‘right not to know’ are principles in biomedical ethics and explicitly recognised by ethical and legal instruments such as the Belgian Patient’s Right Act of 2002 (Article 6) and the European Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine (Article 10.2) [5]. Both rights, as most rights, are not absolute; in some - often very delicate - cases such parental decision-making pro or contra selective abortion following prenatal screening, the right not to know can be turned into a duty to know with obliged disclosure of information. Can one or more of these principles be applied to intensive livestock production and clarify some shortcomings of present disease strategies and/or possibilities of nano-enabled diagnostics? Assuming that the technological limitations can be solved, we believe that the principle of autonomy, as is often the case in bioethics, may play a decisive role in solving this question. Autonomy has a different meaning for livestock producers, veterinary officials, citizens, consumers and animals. Here we will concentrate on the autonomy of the human actors. Nano-enabled diagnostics may become daily routine by both the desire of livestock producers to earn a reasonable income and of authorities to minimise disease management costs such as compensation payments. There are no indications for a decreased consumption of animal products. Considering the high number of farm animals per production unit and per nation, there is a vast potential market for sensors in livestock production. Prices will probably become affordable for producers and authorities as soon as the technology becomes satisfactorily sound. First, permanent investments in sensing networks have to pay off for livestock producers if they are to be implemented. The commercial implementation of implanted sensor networks will depend on the early adoption of such disease management systems by single stockmen entrepreneurs, who are clearly convinced of the benefits (cost reduction) of such system in the long term but have to pay a higher introduction price. This is the bottom-up approach. In this initial stage, the legal framework may not yet oblige producers to implement advanced sensing networks for disease control because they still have the right not to know. However, their right not to know can be overruled by national and supranational legislative force. This top-down policy overrules the initial right of livestock producers not to know because of surplus costs or the infringement of their autonomy (i.e. farmers do not want to be controlled permanently) by a duty to know. The duty to know is already an internationally recognised principle in animal disease management, as can be illustrated by the list of notifiable diseases to which BSE, FMD, AI and BT belong [6]. Secondly, it can be stated that citizens have a right to transparent and up-to-date information about health safety
issues associated with the technology itself, such as bio-accumulation and biodegradability of nano enabled biosensors. From a consumers’ viewpoint, each technology investment in disease control leading to an increase in product price, will be carefully weighted against human health risk probability and risk perception, trust in information sources and other consumer interests such as taste and visual quality characteristics.
4. CONCLUSIONS It is to be expected research and implementation of nano-enabled diagnostics in future livestock production will be favoured by the ‘duty to know’ principle pull effect of citizens, disease management authorities and producers. A consumer’s viewpoint will heavily rely on risk, risk perception, and trust in information sources resulting in the desire having the right to know or the right not to know. These ethical principles need to be taken into account in order to promote sustainability criteria in nano-enabled future livestock production systems. This article does not suggest that future livestock disease eradication strategies will be free of slaughter of infected animals but suggests that nano-enabled diagnostics might significantly reduce the numbers of slaughtered animals.
5. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors greatly acknowledge the financial support of the Institute for the Promotion of Innovation by Science and Technology in Flanders (IWT 050182-NANOSOC).
6. REFERENCES [1] Geering, W.A., Roeder, P.L. and T.U. Obi. Manual on the
preparation of national animal disease emergency preparedness plans. Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, 1999. Available online at http://www.fao.org/docrep/004/x2096e/X2096E00.HTM [Accessed at July 31, 2007].
[2] Wales, C., Harvey and A. Warde. Recuperating from BSE: The shifting UK institutional basis for trust in food. Appetite 47 (2006): 187–195.
[3] Fortina, P., Kricka, L.J., Surrey, S. and Grodzinski, P.. Nanobiotechnology: the promise and reality of new approaches to molecular recognition. Trends in Biotechnology 23 (2005): 168-173.
[4] Velasco-Garcia, M.N. and T. Mottram. Biosensor Technology addressing Agricultural Problems. Biosystems Engineering 84 (2003): 1-12.
[5] Adorno, R. The right not to know: An autonomy based approach. Journal of Medical Ethics 30 (2004): 435-439.
[6] OIE. OIE Listed diseases. World Organisation for Animal Health, 2007. Available online at http://www.oie.int/eng/maladies/en_classification2007.htm?e1d7 [Accessed on August 7, 2007]
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Transferring Responsibility through Use Plans Auke Pols
Eindhoven University of Technology Postbus 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven
0031 40 247 3253 [email protected]
Keywords use plans, control, responsibility
1. INTRODUCTION Good design involves the communication of a use plan: especially with complex artefacts, it is important that the engineer explains the procedure of using the artefact to the intended user [1]. Use plans are more than just useful, however: in this paper, I will argue that use plans transfer certain (moral) responsibilities from the engineer to the user. In particular, I will argue that use plans transfer moral responsibility by transferring regulative control over an artefact.
2. CONTROL The distinction between guidance control and regulative control over actions has been proposed by Fischer and Ravizza [2]. They see guidance control as the ability to freely perform a certain action (e.g. steering a car to the right) and regulative control as the power to exercise guidance control over a certain action, or to exercise guidance control over another action instead (e.g. choosing whether to turn right or left.)
3. USE PLANS If this dual control over actions is applied to artefacts, we get something very close to Houkes’ [3] distinction of use know-how into two components: knowledge that a sequence of actions leads to the realisation of a goal (the use plan), which involves regulative control, and the skills needed to take those actions, which involve guidance control. The added value of Fischer’s and Ravizza’s account is that they link control directly to moral responsibility: if you only have guidance control, you can only be responsible for your actions. If you also have regulative control, on the other hand, you are also responsible for omissions (i.e. failures to act) and consequences of actions.
4. COMBINING APPROACHES Houkes does not deal with responsibility, while Fischer and Ravizza never try to apply their distinction to artefacts. This paper shows that their work can be combined profitably: when engineers transfer knowledge of artefact functions to users via use plans, they transfer regulative control by showing possible ways how guidance control can be exercised over the artefact. Thereby, they also transfer responsibility for actions done with the artefact to the user.
To put this theory to the test, I will show how it can be applied to cases of automobile and traffic technology. For example: when I learn to operate a manual transmission, an elementary use plan is transferred by the instructions on top of the gearstick (my driving instructor will provide a more detailed use plan). By learning how to shift to a specific gear, I gain guidance control over, and thereby responsibility for that action. By learning how not to change gears, or to change to another gear instead, I also gain regulative control. This gives me responsibility for the consequences of changing to that specific gear, or for the omission to do so, for now I could have done otherwise.
5. REFERENCES [1] Houkes, W.N., Vermaas, P.E., Dorst, K., and De Vries,
M.J. Design and Use as Plans: An Action-Theoretical Account. Design Studies, 23, 2002, 303-320.
[2] Fischer, J.M., and Ravizza, M. Responsibility and Control. A theory of Moral Responsibility. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998.
[3] Houkes, W.N. Knowledge of artefact functions. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 37, 2006, 102-113.
[4]
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An Overlooked Responsibility: The Informed Consent of Graduate Engineering Researchers
Erik Fisher Center for Nanotechnology in Society
Arizona State University Tempe, Arizona, 85287-4401 USA
001-480-727-8830
Michael Lightner Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Colorado at Boulder Boulder, Colorado 80309 USA
001-303-492-5180
ABSTRACT Of the large number of new and emerging technologies that are being developed in academic laboratories around the world, several of these—nanotechnology, synthetic biology, cognitive enhancement technologies and in vivo biochips—are the subject of prominent concerns over their potential for broader societal implications. Historically, policy attention has engaged questions concerning regulation of such technologies and whether certain lines of potentially controversial research should be pursued, while considerably less attention has been devoted to formally engaging those who conduct such research with respect to end-use and other “downstream” implications. Graduate engineering researchers in particular should be given an opportunity to consent to being informed participants in potentially controversial research. Having the opportunity to choose to participate in an ethically informed way in such research would help protect the ethical integrity of graduate researchers and would also enhance the development of their ethical and technical skills in a mutually beneficial way. Existing ethics policies that attempt to integrate ethics and engineering research obligate researchers to adhere to standards and protocols designed to assure the integrity of research, but primarily from the standpoint of bringing research into compliance with practices approved by others. For example, internal review boards, IRBs, require researchers who work with human subjects to adhere to approved rigorously reviewed experimental protocols with specific informed consent of subjects. However, such established “rule based” [1] practices become easily mechanized and fail to engage the ethical capacity of researchers whose daily work may potentially be associated with a range of downstream societal implications. In addition to assuring the ethical integrity of research, research ethics policies ought to assure the ethical integrity of the researchers themselves. While others have considered the possible need for the informed consent of those who may be impacted by the eventual use of various technologies [2, 3], the authors are aware of no recognition of the need for procuring the informed consent of graduate engineering researchers. In the context of university-based research, engaging the informed consent of these researchers is, we will argue, the responsibility of the research directors under whose tutelage academic researchers are being trained and operate. Not only would such engagement be in line with internal laboratory governance practices, it would also better assure that research students are adequately informed and in explicit agreement with such practices. Thus this informed consent would protect the ethical integrity of research students whose ethical capacity to conduct research is still developing. Moreover, for graduate researchers, ethical capacity is developing alongside technical capacity; thus, we also argue, this engagement could lead to a more productive
environment for engineering research in light of the interplay between technical and ethical considerations—promoting reflexive awareness [4]. Our principle claim is that, in certain instances, from both educational and human development perspectives, graduate research students should be informed about ethical concerns pertaining to impacts of the end-uses of their work insofar as they are participants in potentially controversial undertakings. Accordingly, in addition to being responsible to engage graduate researchers in the specific intellectual and practical aspects of the research area, it follows that laboratory directors, as university agents, are responsible for assuring that these researchers are informed of the range of implications of their work and explicitly consent to the practices in place to address ethical concerns. This laboratory director’s responsibility can be addressed by employing what we term an Ethically Informed Research (EIR) protocol. In addition to raising the general awareness of graduate researchers about the broader implications of their work, an EIR aimed at assuring informed consent in these cases would require the specific agreement on the part of researchers that 1) they have been informed of potential broader societal implications and 2) they explicitly agree to begin or continue with the research and 3) that established laboratory practices are in their view adequate to protect society from inadvertent harms. We note that the last part of the EIR is an outgrowth of the safety training that is typical in dealing with hazardous or potentially hazardous materials, but now within an ethical framework informed by a larger discussion of societal and potential downstream impacts. In this approach, informed consent should be procured in the early stages of research, and should emerge from deliberative activities involving all research group members. As research proceeds, however, its evolving nature may then require additional opportunities for further employment of the EIR, thus revisiting and if necessary deepening the deliberative process of assuring continued informed consent. Re-initiating the informed consent process would be triggered by the addition of a new research student to the group. Substantial changes in the direction or evolution of the research would also constitute a need to re-open group discussion. Experimental data generated within the group, or found within the body of literature relevant to the research would likewise mark the need to renew the discursive process of giving consent. Finally, events that occur in the outside environment—such as documented unintended consequences stemming from relevant technological developments—would occasion a return to the deliberative activities to assure laboratory procedures are appropriate, discuss additional implications of the research, and reconfirm the consent of the engineering researchers.
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In summary, the proposed approach would aim to achieve three important outcomes: developing and protecting the ethical integrity of research students, assuring due diligence on the part of the research group in protecting broader social welfare, and creating greater sensitivity on the part of researchers to changes in the research environment. This latter outcome is of particular interest insofar as it may increase the responsive capacity of researchers by empowering them to actively engage research developments from both technical and ethical standpoints, thus productively linking two domains that are rarely treated in tandem. We also note that this approach does not argue against the research activities but arises naturally out of existing safety training with the addition of an important ethical dimension. We suggest that this natural extension will increase the probability of adoption and success of the approach.
REFERENCES [1] Berne, R.W. Tiny Ethics for Big Challenges: Calling for
an Ethics of Nanoscale Scioence and Engineering. IEEE Circuuits Devices Magazine (May/June 2004), 10-17.
[2] Martin, M.W. and Schinzinger, R. Ethics in Engineering.
McGraw-Hill, 1983. [3] Shrader-Frechette, K. Nanotoxicology and Ethical
Conditions for Informed Consent. Nanoethics (March 2007), 47-56.
[4] [4] Fisher, E. and Mahajan, R.L. Midstream Modulation of
Nanotechnology Research in an Academic Laboratory. In International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (Chicago, IL, Nov 5-10, 2006). American Society for Mechanical Engineers.
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Technology and engineering in the context Sylvain LAVELLE
Centre Éthique Technique et Société Institut Catholique des Arts et Métiers.
6 Rue Auber 59000 Lille, France
ABSTRACT Technology is a synthetic process which articulates several aspects commonly distinguished by classical philosophy (physical / hermeneutical ; theoretical / practical). Technology is characterized on the one hand by its universal norms and procedures, and, on the other, by its relative uses and significances. It seems that technology can hardly be thought over regardless of the context of use of technical artefacts, which impacts the context of design and production. The notion of context can be considered either as a frame of situation or as a frame of reference given the importance of factors which condition the thought and activity of the people. The context is a relevant notion to encompass the variety of cultural settings, be they the opposition between local culture and global culture, between technical culture and social culture, or the differences between the multi-culture, the trans-culture and the inter-culture. However, the idea of a cultural relativism of technology induced by the notion of context questions the relevance of the notion of paradigm as applied to technology. Technology indeed relates cognition and action more clearly than science in integrating, within the socio-technical process, in a community that is broader than that of experts and professionals, a set of beliefs, values, preferences and habits. The latter can be regarded as extrinsic or as intrinsic according to the demarcations produced in the ordinary hermeneutics of technology. One can make the hypothesis, from the perspective of cultural relativism, of an incommensurability of technical paradigms, and more, of socio-technical paradigms. Each paradigm is related as a defining character to the context of a cultural community, which can be confined to the one of designers and producers, or extended to the one of users. Now, the hypothesis of an incommensurability of paradigms is disputed by the translation devices of what may be called a
socio-technical inter-culture. Inter-culture in general can be considered as a frame of relations, a ‘meta-frame’ of reference enabling communication between individuals belonging to some heterogeneous frames of reference. Socio-technical inter-culture functions at two levels, enabling (1) a relationship between technical culture and social culture (2) a relationship between inner culture and outer culture. It is likely to operate through the whole technological process, from design to use, and also from use to significance of technical artefacts. Thus, it opens wide possibilities for understanding, appropriating and diversifying of technical systems for the users on the one hand, and of hermeneutical systems for the designers and the producers on the other. Dealing with and integrating the variety of cultural contexts in the design and production of technical artefacts is probably the task of a new intercultural engineering. The intercultural stance tends to minor the importance of paradigms inherent to various cultural contexts in the dynamic of technology. However, the intercultural stance is not merely an engineering method enabling to optimise a process, it is also a conditional and hazardous apprenticeship, as well as an existential experience of the relativity, and consequently, of the communicability of cultures. This requires that one distinguishes several levels of inter-culture : weak, middle and strong, or, in other words, superficial, balanced and radical. The intercultural stance is no doubt effect-inducing on the ontological and axiological structures of the lifeworld, on the world versions and on the life balance of individuals. In that way, an intercultural stance ‘in the context’ is likely to transform the cultural frame of reference which usually shapes the ordinary existence of individuals, and thus, to produce some effects ‘out of the context’.
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Metaphysics of Engineering Taft H. Broome, Jr.
Howard University Washington, DC 20059 USA
Keywords Philosophy and engineering, abstract algebra, heuristics, assigned world, hyperreal world, engineering numbers, mesofinitesimals, error analysis.
1. INTRODUCTION Leibniz’s infinitesimal is a fixed quantity smaller than any
finite number, but not zero. He referenced his infinitesimals by the signs dx, dy, etc., and attempted to fit them into the set of real numbers R. His attempts required ad hoc rules. For example, in the same discussion, scientists and engineers are known to arrive at
12
cos(dx) 1 cos(dx) 10 and dxdx dx
− −= = − ,
The distinction between these conclusions is not a trivial one. At a glance one sees that division of these terms by dx produces radically different results: 0 and -½. Nevertheless, Leibniz’s results were right more often than not, and he would be credited along with Newton for the invention of calculus.
Calculus was perfected by the invention of the limit. To perfect it, Cauchy and its other inventors gave the infinitesimal a new Gestalt. Still smaller than any finite number and not zero, the new infinitesimal was not a fixed quantity. It was given a temporal Gestalt. When we look at
dx 0
cos(dx) 1lim 0dx→
−⎛ ⎞ =⎜ ⎟⎝ ⎠
the limit symbolism suggests a finite quantity that is diminishing. That quantity does not diminish in accordance with a universal clock, i.e. in wall-clock time. Rather, we ap-prehend it in existential time, i.e. in accordance with a personal, mental stopwatch that engages whenever we look at it; runs un-til we look away; and then resets. The limit became the systematic alternative to Leibniz’s infinitesimal.
After the limit had become a systematic alternative to the infinitesimal, Abraham Robinson (Hurd and Loeb 1985) cap-tured a Gestalt of the time-varying infinitesimal in R∞ using hyperreal numbers, but he manipulated them systematically according to formal replicants of Leibniz’s ad hoc rules. For ex-ample, where Leibniz wrote dx Robinson could write dx such that
( )1 12 3x 1, , , ...=d .
The Gestalt of a dx diminishing in existential time obtains when reading the sequence in the parentheses from left to right.
At first glance, Leibniz’s infinitesimal and his ad hoc rules for manipulating it would seem to persist in many quarters of science and engineering. However, close inspection of some uses of dx in science and engineering betray meanings for dx that Leibniz never intended for his infinitesimal. Recalling that Leibniz’s infinitesimals are neither finite nor zero, we are sur-
prised to find in science and engineering literatures discussions putting dx = 0.2 or dx = 0.0 but manipulating the sign “dx” in accordance with Leibniz’s ad hoc rules. To distance these prac-tices from Leibniz’s intentions, this paper uses ∆x, ∆y, etc., to reference numbers that may be zero or finite but which submit to Leibniz’s ad hoc rules. Herein they are called mesofini-tesimals.
2. AIMS In this paper error analysis expressions in the form
xT = x + ∆x are explored. If x references a measured quantity, for example, then xT references truth, x is called knowledge of the truth, and ∆x is called the error in x. In science this expression is considered a member of a Peircian sequence wherein x approaches xT in the limit and the current x is said to be an ap-proximation of x. In engineering, however, Peircian sequences are often impossible to establish in view of the engineer’s imperatives: exigency; complexity to the point of poorly under-stood novelty; and threat of lethality. Thus, the mesofinitesimal becomes one of Koen’s heuristics. (Koen 2003)
The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that what appears to be an ad hoc attempt by engineers to approximate the real world is actually a systematic account of the hyperreal world known as the assigned world. (Broome 1985) The natural laws of the assigned world consist in part of some natural laws of the real world. They consist, moreover, in the engineer’s im-peratives and Koen’s heuristics.
3. METHODOLOGY The method of justifying this claim borrows from abstract
algebra. Specifically, the above expression is replaced by the following expression:
x x, x= ∆ ,
which is used to formally reproduce in R2 the error analyses produced ad hoc in R.
DEFINITION-1: engineering numbers. Let E ⊂ R2 such that
for every x x, x= ∆ and y y, y= ∆ in E we have:
a. ˆ ˆx y x y and x y;= ⇔ = ∆ = ∆
b. ˆ ˆ ˆz x y z x y and z x y= + ⇒ = + ∆ = ∆ + ∆ in E; and
c. ˆ ˆ ˆ ˆ ˆz x y x y x, x y, y z xy and z y x= • = = ∆ • ∆ ⇒ = ∆ = ∆in E.
Then, ˆ x and ˆ y are called engineering numbers and E is the set of engineering numbers. The quadruple (E, =, +, •), namely the space of engineering numbers, is not an algebraic field but the algebraic ring denoted E (Broome 2004), and the following is derived:
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12x 0
ˆˆcos(x) 1lim 0, xx→
−= − ∆ .
Thus a new grammar of exactitude for engineers is crafted in an algebraic structure over R2 named E.
4. CONCLUSIONS The grammar E references a hyperreal world called the as-signed world. This is a speculative enlargement of the real world whose natural laws can be expressed by a coherent ar-rangement of real numbers obeying formal syntactical rules, and mesofinitesimals obeying Leibniz’s ad hoc syntactical rules. New numbers called engineering numbers are used to replicate in E well-known problems of exactitude treated in R. These problems range from error analysis to first-order trun-cation or approximation practices, sensitivity analysis, compu-ter software precision analysis, and the calculus of the varia-tion; and they range through functional analysis, matrix analy-
sis and differential calculus. All proofs were sufficiently elementary for undergraduate student exercises and, like the complex number, the engineering number may well prove ca-pable of ready translation into computer compiler language.
5. REFERENCES [1] Broome, T.H. 1985. Engineering the Philosophy of
Science. Metaphilosophy, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 47-56. [2] Broome, T.H. 2004. Grammars of Exactitude in Science
and Engineering. Speaker: Mathematicans Colloquium, Department of Mathematics, Morgan State University, Baltimore, MD⎯September 30.
[3] Hurd, A.E. and Loeb, P.A. 1985. An Introduction to Nonstandard Ana-lysis. New York, NY: Academic Press, Inc.
[4] Koen, B.V. 2003. Discussion of the Method. New York, NY: Oxford Uni-versity Press.
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Educating Engineers for the 21st Century … and why some elements of History and Philosophy should be
incorporated into the curriculum William Grimson
Dublin Institute of Technology Academic Affairs
143-149 Rathmines Rd, Dublin 6 +353 1 402 7510
Mike Murphy Dublin Institute of Technology
Faculty of Engineering Bolton Street, Dublin 1
+353 1 402 3649
Eugene Coyle Dublin Institute of Technology
Faculty of Engineering Kevin Street, Dublin 8
+353 1 402 4551
ABSTRACT It has been said that in some respects the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky was a magpie – borrowing styles and ideas from diverse sources for whatever musical project he was working on. The practice of engineering has this same characteristic in that it willingly takes ideas, knowledge and techniques from wherever in pursuit of completing its goal. Further, Engineering is, at least in part, in agreement with Fyodor Dostoevsky – ‘if everything on Earth were rational, nothing would happen’. Against such a background it is proposed that a framework based on both philosophy and the history of engineering, science and technology constitutes a valid footing upon which engineers can be enabled to see and develop their profession in a suitably rounded manner. Engineering as a discipline has advanced considerably in the technological sense and a thorough understanding of technological developments is an important part of the ‘creation’ of an engineer. But it is becoming increasingly clear that there is a lot more to engineering than science and technology together with a few elements of business. Today, the established and accepted method of educating the engineer evolved in the post-war era of the 1950’s and was based on first teaching the fundamental scientific principles and following in later years with discipline-specific knowledge and design techniques. Industry was then left to educate the young engineer in the on-the-job skills of teamwork, communications, ethics, etc. In recent years a number of important and influential bodies have begun to explore whether this accepted method is the appropriate model for educating engineers given the challenges that they will face in their career. For example the US National Academy of Engineering has described the engineer of 2020 and proposed mechanisms to educate that engineer. Educational standards bodies such as ABET and corresponding ones in Europe including Engineers Ireland have developed new accreditation guidelines for engineering programmes to ensure that graduates from these programmes have the skills that were traditionally left to industry to develop in their engineering employees. Within industry, companies have identified the desired attributes that they seek in an engineer. All these revised skills and attributes leads one to the conclusion that the modern world requires a more rounded and developed engineer. Coming from a different direction authors such as Rosalind Williams and John Heywood (both from what might loosely be termed the liberal arts) have conjectured that the engineering profession has lost its identity. And it is argued that in the long run engineers will have to face up to a long term convergence between technological and liberal arts education. Their prediction is that if engineers do not accept a hybrid educational activity they will be consigned to purely technical work activities. And consequently the engineer would not be
ideally suited to provide the type and level of leadership required in our more complex society. In Europe, implementation of the Bologna Declaration provides an excellent opportunity to examine how some degree of convergence between technological and liberal arts education can be achieved in the context of a two-cycle engineering system of education. The first cycle, of normal duration three years, might not admit much in the way of such a convergence and it might also be problematic in the second-cycle especially if such a degree is not designed to follow on directly from a specific first cycle one. However there is good scope for incorporating appropriate elements of liberal education in an integrated five year programme. But what should these elements be? Reaching any consensus on this will not be straightforward when one considers, for example, the report by the Royal Academy of Engineering (UK) Educating Engineers for the 21st Century, June 2007 which states that “Universities must continue to teach 'core engineering' and not dilute course content with peripheral subject matter. They add that ‘there is a limited requirement for training in key business skills, envisaged primarily as commercial awareness - an understanding of how businesses work and the importance of the customer – combined with the basic principles of project management.” This view is sharply contrasted with that of IBM where they envisage services, sciences, management and engineering “bringing together ongoing work in computer science, operations research, industrial engineering, business strategy, management sciences, social and cognitive sciences, and legal sciences to develop the skills required in a services-led economy.” Going a little further, educators such as Gary Downey have developed an Ethnographical approach exploring the relationship between knowledge and personhood (engineer). Again from an educational perspective, consider Harvey Mudd College, California, which “seeks to educate engineers, scientists, and mathematicians, well versed in all of these areas and in the humanities and the social sciences so that they may assume leadership in their fields with a clear understanding of the impact of their work on society.” The National Academy of Engineering (US) in The Engineer of 2020: Visions of Engineering in the New Century sets the goal to “maintain the nation’s economic competitiveness and improve the quality of life for people around the world, engineering educators and curriculum developers must anticipate dramatic changes in engineering practice and adapt their programs accordingly.” In addition to identifying the ideal attributes of the engineer of 2020, the report recommends ways to improve the training of engineers to prepare them for addressing the complex technical, social, and ethical questions raised by emerging technologies. Boeing have, inter alia, identified the Desired Attributes of an Engineer other than technical that includes a basic
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understanding of the context in which engineering is practiced. Amongst topics addressed are: economics, history, ethics, the environment, as well as customer and societal needs. Some of the skills identified include: good communications, high ethical standards, an ability to think critically and creatively and independently, the ability and self-confidence to be flexible, and an understanding of the importance of teamwork. What is clear overall is that a body of engineers and engineering educators do believe that the educational development of a “more rounded” engineer needs to be achieved. This article considers one particular aspect of what could be best achieved through an exposure to elements of a traditional liberal arts education and that is the role of the history of ideas in engineering coupled with an analysis of some major engineering developments from a philosophical perspective. A range of examples are included with particular emphasis on ‘design’ illustrating the proposed approach and the examples are chosen not for the depth involved but rather to ensure that they can be understood by a general audience. The roles of heuristics, empiricism, rationalism, logic, ethics, and aesthetics are considered illustrating the relevance of philosophy to the practice of engineering. In addition some comments on an evolutionary perspective are presented using the ‘meme’ concept of Dawkins. Our goal in this paper is to demonstrate that the education of the modern engineer will be improved by focusing on the development of a range of attributes both from the traditional engineering pedagogy but also attributes more usually developed through a liberal arts education, including history and philosophy. The successful result, we argue, will be the well-rounded or more-rounded engineer of the 21st century. But, however convincing the case might be to the authors, it is an entirely different matter when it comes to winning the argument with academic staff in an engineering faculty or school to include some element of liberal arts education in what is usually an already tightly packed curriculum. And even if an acceptance is won there still remains the problem of deciding how to deliver to the students the chosen liberal arts material. For the first challenge there is no ready simple solution. Colleges are often conservative for good reasons and are not overly susceptible to the current demands of industry and would generally claim that they are educating their students not for ‘the first job’ but for life. Nevertheless this ‘for life’ aspect
coupled with the recruitment policies of some influential employers should eventually bring about the conditions by which the engineering curriculum is opened to include liberal arts studies such as philosophy. There is also peer pressure as an agent of change by which well regarded institutions can influence others. Further, once some empirical evidence is accumulated that demonstrates that there are benefits to be obtained accrediting bodies will be encouraged to make provision in their guidelines to colleges seeking an accreditation for a broadened engineering curriculum. Finally, on this first challenge, the identification of some metrics by which the benefits can be assessed in time is a task that engineering educationalists should address now. Regarding the second challenge – how to deliver the liberal arts material in an engineering programme. This question has a parallel with what is sometimes a contentious matter in an engineering faculty, namely should mathematics be taught by engineers to engineers or should mathematics be a subject taught by mathematicians. Happily the evidence is that both approaches can work and the outcome either way depends heavily on the teaching style, interests and enthusiasm of the staff involved. Regarding the inclusion of liberal arts challenge, the authors of this article favour a ‘have your cake and eat it approach’ by first having engineering staff embed in their technical subjects some elements of philosophy, history of engineering and science, and the history of ideas, largely through well chosen examples. And then at a later stage introducing a more formal exposure of the students to philosophy, history, ideas etc by specialists in these fields. The supporting argument for ‘embedding’ is that engineering is inherently philosophical and also it is natural to include a historical account of engineering developments in presenting topics such as the internal combustion engine, digital computers, jet engine, bridges etc. The argument for later deploying a specialist is that such an approach is best suited to the students gaining a deeper appreciation of the liberal arts topics and achieving a facility in using the methods and tools associated with, say, the study of philosophy and history. On this last point, for some it is sufficient to study these areas for no other reason than that they are interesting topics in their own right; but most engineers would be appreciative if the knowledge, insight and skills so gained allowed them to be better ‘citizens’ of their own profession.
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Leadership in Engineering Pieter M. Schrijnen
Delft University of Technology Department of Transport & Planning
PO Box 5048, 2600 GA Delft The Netherlands +31 6 2845 7628
ABSTRACT
Tuning land use and transport is not only relevant for each of these policy fields; it has a major impact on the regional economy and the environment, too. Yet, again and again, the collaboration between land use planners and transport engineers proves to be problematic. Apart from institutional barriers and diverging interests, the focus of both engineers and planners appears to be very different. Engineers and planners seem to be driven by different forces. Their professional languages, technologies and frameworks hamper communication and collaboration.
This abstract explores the characteristics of this diversion, and explores an approach towards an improved collaboration. Concepts from education sciences, cognitive psychology, organizational learning and systems theory are used. This abstract suggests that the education of both professions needs reframing. Land use planners are now taught to solve planning problems, just as transport engineers are taught to solve transport problems. But, society needs planners as well as engineers to solve societal problems. Teaching leadership might be a proper answer to this challenge.
Keywords Transport engineering, land use planning, environment, integration, leadership.
1 SILOS VERSUS INTEGRATION All over the world, people, firms and governments have to deal with expanding city regions, growing congestion and the environmental impact of traffic in towns. It is widely understood that the integration of transport engineering and physical planning enhances the performance of transport systems and spatial systems, and can be beneficial for the economy and the environment as well [1]. The conclusions are shared, on all levels of scale, within the transport and the land use communities, but also by actors with an economic or environmental background [2].
In reality most administrations work wit a silo-structure. Land use and transport are governed by separate departments and separate politicians. Merging policy fields costs much energy and is risky. Organisations and personnel do not seem well equipped to create an integrative system. Although most professionals and politicians state a preference for integration, their behaviour is focused on solving the problems of their own field, with strong setbacks for the transport systems and the land use systems.
2 PROFESSIONAL MENTAL MODELS The lack of integration can be clarified by studying the way both professions view each other. Argyris & Schön already revealed part of these views. According to them, most professionals espouse the theory that, in interactions, respect and openness towards other actors, sharing of knowledge, and transparency of intentions are beneficial for all concerned. But when observing the actual behaviour of professionals another theory appears to be at work. Most professionals actually try to exert unilateral control over their interactions with others. They act as if a focus on ‘winning’ is needed to minimise ‘losing’. Negative feelings are to be suppressed. Public testing of assumptions is intolerably risky. Most professionals assume that other actors hold the same values [3]. This behaviour creates its own reality: if actor A isn’t certain about whether or not to trust actor B, it can be hard for A to take risks, and it seems better to avoid open and transparent behaviour. If A doesn’t show trustworthy behaviour, B becomes uncertain about the intentions of A. B then starts avoiding taking risks himself. A then sees his suppositions confirmed. Now, both actors have a situation that confirms the presumed lack of trust without them being conscious of the fact that they themselves created that situation. So, these mental models create their own reality. Such processes have been empirically shown in many occasions, in the interactions of professionals willing to learn [3], in negotiations [4], in counselling [5] and in education [6]. On top of these ‘generic’ theories-in-use, planners and engineers hold specific theories-in-use about their interactions. Recently, a benevolent group of Dutch transport engineers and physicals planners expressed the perceptions they hold about each other. According to the planners, engineers do not think much of people working on vague things like aesthetics. The planners stated that engineers base their reasoning to much on guidelines, quantitative analysis, or rules. They are assumed to lack creativity; they just focus on problems within their own policy domain (congestion, infrastructure projects). In the eyes of transport engineers, land use planners do not work from a functional analysis, they lack knowledge about traffic and transport; they are arrogant and like to evade rules. Planners are assumed to think in terms of images. Facts, numbers or calculations are not relevant to them [7].
With such models in mind, planners and engineers indeed have trouble collaborating. The models they hold, prevent them to trust each other, and to step into the integration of both policy fields.
3 PROFESIONAL COMPETENCIES Students that enter the university can hardly be framed by the dominant culture in their new field of interest. Yet, a (first,
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small) scan of the preferences of the students entering the department of civil engineering and the department of architecture already shows strong differences. When asked for their interests, students that enter an education in transport engineering tend to have more interest in concrete objects, mathematics, problem solving and modeling; whereas students that enter an education in land use planning tend to have more interest in social concepts, esthetics, idea generation and processes between people.
Of course, each profession needs students with the interests and competencies that cohere with the field of work. But the curricula do not extend the competencies. The courses offered in the respective faculties narrow down the focus of the students: civil engineering offers mostly courses in mathematics, modeling, and problem solving; whereas urbanism mostly offers courses in design, creativity, esthetics, and presentation. What both curricula do is in fact reinforce the mental models that the students hold at the beginning of their education.
It is probably this process that hampers the eventual collaboration. Neuroscientists as well as cognitive psychologists both stress the fact people are being hold by their mental models. Once a person or her brains have some model of a situation, it starts looking for new information from the perspective of that model. People appear to focus their attention on that information which is meaningful to them. They fail to consider realities that lie outside their models, even if these might offer better outcomes. Neural networks and mental models thus govern behaviour and create their own reality: that part of reality that supports the model will be affirmed and recreated through the behaviour of the individual. The models govern the behaviour of people without them being conscious of it [3, 8].
4 LEARNING LEADERSHIP The educationalist Elbow challenges people to take responsibility for the limited scope of their mental models: “Since perception and cognition are processes in which the organism ‘constructs’ what it sees or thinks according to models that are already there, the organism tends to throw away or distort material that does not fit this model. The surest way to get hold of what your present frame blinds you to is to try to adopt the opposite frame, that is, to reverse your model” [9]. Senge confirms this view. It is a core aspect of leadership to become aware of ones ignorance and incompetences and to address these as areas for personal growth [10]. Hämäläinen and Saarinen extend the concept of leadership to the shortcomings in the organisational pattern people work and live in. They call this competence: systems intelligence, the ability to see oneself as an element in the system, as an element that can improve the performance of the community one participates in. Every individual has a choice in adding trust and safety to her interactions with others, to become pro-active in the creation of the conditions for openness and receptiveness [11]. The common focus of education is on professional content, on the interests of the sector the profession is working for. It confirms and reinforces the models that beginning students
already hold. Regular education hardly learns students to reflect on ones mental models, or to interact with people or professionals that hold contrasting views, that foster contrasting interests. The need for integration of land use and transport is one of many terrains that need integrative interaction as the major tool for innovation or for creating sustainable systems. It would be a major contribution of the universities, if they can develop their curricula in this direction.
Formally, the education policies of the European Union support this development [12]. The Dutch technological universities started to reflect on the competencies that they actually develop in their students [13]. This is a major challenge that needs much attention. As in all education, good teaching starts with the reflection on the mental models that teachers hold. Improving the competencies of the students thus requires developing the competencies for reflection of the educational staff. In this, the university staff can develop its own leadership.
5 REFERENCES [1] For instance: World Bank (2002). Cities on the Move.
World Bank, Washington DC. [2] For instance: WBCSD (2001). Mobility 2001 (Prepared by
MIT and Charles River Associates), Geneva, Switzerland. [3] Argyris, Chris and Donald A. Schön (1991/1974): Theory
in Practice. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass Publishers. And: Argyris, Chris (1991). Teaching smart people how to learn. Harvard Business Review 69(3): 99-109.
[4] Fisher, R., Ury, W., & Patton, B. (1991). Getting to Yes (2nd ed.). New York: Penguin Books.
[5] Miller, W. R. and S. Rollnick (2002). Motivational Interviewing. New York, London, The Guildford Press.
[6] Holmer, Leanna (2001). Will we teach leadership or skilled incompetence? Journal of Management Education 25(5): 590-605.
[7] Linssen, Raymond (2004). Impressies Mythemeeting Mobiliteit en Ruimte. NIROV, The Hague.
[8] Rudrauf, David et al. (2003). From autopoieisis to neurophenomenology. Biological Research Vol. 36, no. 1. or: Camerer, Colin, George Loewenstein & Drazen Prelec (2005). Neuroeconomics. Journal of Economic Literature Vol XLIII (2005), 9-64.
[9] Elbow, Peter (1986): Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
[10] Senge, Peter (1990): The fifth discipline. London, Random House.
[11] Hämäläinen, Raimo, and Esa Saarinen (2007). Systems intelligence. Reflections 7(4): 17-28.
[12] European Commission (2001). Making a European area of life long learning a reality. EU, Brussels
[13] Meijers, A.W.M., et al. (2005). Criteria for Academic Bachelor's and Master's Curricula. Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven University of Technology.
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Japanese Engineers Meet Western Ethics: The Introduction of Engineering Ethics Into Japan and
BeyondJun Fudano
Kanazawa Institute of Technology Director of the Applied Ethics Center for Engineering and Science
(AECES)
ABSTRACT Engineering ethics, especially its American version, has been introduced to the Japanese engineering community in the last decade of the 20th century. The historical process of the introduction of engineering ethics in Japan will be discussed in the first part of the presentation. In the second part, the research project entitled “the Formation of the Ethics Crossroads and the
Construction of Science and Engineering Ethics,” which has been supported by the Japanese Science and Technology Agency, and its results will be described to show how engineering ethics can be developed in the Japanese context with a global perspective.
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Authors Index
Abbott, R. .............................................................53 Asaro, Peter..........................................................19 Bao, Ou.................................................................76 Bedau, M. .............................................................12 Bernhard, Jonte ....................................................70 Børsen, Tom ...........................................................6 Bowen, W. Richard ...............................................59 Broome, Taft .........................................................99 Bucciarelli, Louis L................................................88 Coeckelbergh, Mark..............................................61 Consoli, Luca ........................................................58 Danielson, Peter ...................................................91 Davis, Michael ......................................................50 Didier, Christelle ...................................................41 Doridot, Fernand...................................................11 Driessen, Clemens .................................................4 Durbin, Paul ..........................................................47 Evers, Johan, & De Tavernier, Johan...................93 Fahmi, Marco........................................................51 Farber, Darryl, Pietrucha, Martin T., & Lakhtakia, Akhlesh................................................45 Fisher, Erik, & Lightner, Michael ..........................96 Fox, Andrew, & Crudington, Andrew ....................31 Fritzsche, Albrecht ..........................................69, 82 Fudano, Jun........................................................105 Fujimoto, Ryoji ......................................................89 Gedge, Dennis......................................................15 Goldberg, David E. ...............................................35 Grimson, William, Murphy, Mike, & Coyle, Eugene ...............................................................101 Gunn, Alastair .......................................................38
Hanks, Craig ........................................................ 67 Kinderlerer, Julian & Kuan-Ting, Chi.................... 73 Koch, Steffen........................................................ 84 Koen, Billy V......................................................... 32 Kreuk, M. K. de, van de Poel, I. R., Swart, S. D., & van Loosdrecht, M. C. M............................. 21 Lavelle, Sylvain .................................................... 98 Li, Bocong ............................................................ 62 Luegenbiehl, Heinz C........................................... 43 McCarthy, Natasha ................................................ 1 Mitcham, Carl, & Mackey, Robert ........................ 29 Moriarty, Gene ............................................... 17, 77 Moses, Joel .......................................................... 55 Nikitina, Elena ...................................................... 75 Ottens, Maarten ................................................... 65 Pieters, Kees........................................................ 80 Pirtle, Zach ............................................................. 9 Pitt, Joe .................................................................. 8 Pols, Auke J. K..................................................... 95 Radder, Hans ....................................................... 57 Robison, Wade....................................................... 2 Schrijnen, Pieter M............................................. 103 Schuurbiers, Daan ............................................... 72 Spier, Ray ............................................................ 68 Steen, Marc.......................................................... 86 Vermaas, Pieter ................................................... 25 Veruggio, G, & Operto, F. .................................... 23 Vincenti, Walter .................................................... 37 Vries, Marc J.de .................................................. 27 Wang, Dazhou ..................................................... 79 Zwaag van der , Sybrand, & Kroesen, Otto ......... 39
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