The Engineering Project: Its Nature, Ethics, and Promise

ONE Process

In the premodern era, which lasted roughly from the time of the pyramids to the heyday of the medieval cathedral, engineering processes of a basic sort did exist. Engineers had a kind of knowing that can be described as know-how, which was embedded in skills of various sorts. In building their aqueducts, for instance, Roman engineers had to know how to locate sources of water. They had to know how to dig tunnels. They had to know how to construct pumps. They had to know how to purify water. They acquired this know-how as apprentices, through experience, or by trial and error. However, toward the end of the medieval period, engineering knowhow began to couple with the know-what of the modern scientiWc mind, which was just then beginning to bloom. The premodern engineering endeavor began its transformation into the modern engineering enterprise. Means, methods, and procedures within the process of engineering began to become explicit, and mathematical and scientiWc theory to reveal, in what was assumed to be a clear and distinct fashion, the essence or whatness of the universe. At the same time, the engineering enterprise gradually came into its own as a unique practice, thanks in large measure to the emergence of an increasingly clear and distinct methodology. The scientiWc method, in broad outline, was adopted by the engineering enterprise. Of course, what constituted the scientiWc method originally and ideally has today been recognized as less of an objective procedure and more of a human practice involving imagination, speculation, intuition , heuristics, and often just plain luck. All of these human elements, encompassing both know-how and know-what, are intrinsic to contemporary real-world engineering practice. However, René Descartes (1596– 1650) was the Wrst to formulate a methodology that, in a rough and ready one process 1. Albert Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 35. sense, became useful to engineering. Descartes’s method consists of four rules: abstraction, dissection, reconstruction, and control.1 The Wrst two are fundamental to the practice of analysis, the second two to synthesis. Through analysis, science enters the program of engineering in an explicit manner. The method instructs the practitioner to abstract a representation of a realm of concern from its context or world, and then dissect that abstracted representation into its fundamental parts. These practices are for the sake, initially, of scientiWc understanding. As the engineers understood it, however, this scientiWc understanding was inevitably for the sake of subsequent engineering developments. For example, in contemporary engineering practice, analysis of a circuit yields an understanding of the power and energy associated with various circuit elements. But that understanding is in the service of developing, say, a control system that uses the circuit but has another larger task assigned to it, like stabilizing an aircraft. Although the knowing-how of the premodern engineer was still important, it was scientiWc knowing-what that came to characterize the analytic side of modern engineering. The synthetic aspects of the modern engineering process are derived from the rules of reconstruction and control of the Cartesian method. When engineers reconstruct, they assemble the parts separated in analysis . The goal is to synthesize a system, in a timely manner, that meets the speciWcations of a customer. Even though the know-how of premodern engineering synthesis is now coupled with the know-what of the modern engineering enterprise, this does not mean that engineering has become a science or even an applied science. The fundamental knowing-how, which had always been at the heart of the engineering project, was reWned, not replaced, by scientiWc knowing-what. Modern engineering employs what might be called a scientiWcally informed heuristic procedure applied to a collection of activities, including design, testing, production, manufacturing , marketing, maintenance, and control. All these activities are at Wrst contextually situated and constrained, but once the method swings into gear, it seeks to elude its contextual constraints. If the methods of the modern engineering enterprise are truly de-worlded, then their unfoldings proceed in a straightforward and unencumbered fashion. That is the way, for the most part, that engineering is taught in engineering schools. 14 part i: the modern engineering enterprise Although it embraces scientiWc methods, engineering itself is not a science . Unlike engineering, science seeks objective and ideally value-free truth for its own sake. Science operates at the level of theory, a theory of reality. A science of engineering...