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To say that what engineers know constitutes engineering knowledge, just as what scientists know constitutes scientific knowledge, is a misleading way of expressing what ought to be a truism. For surely what constitutes scientific knowledge exceeds not only what one scientist knows but even the sum total of what all scientists know – since there are scientific truths that no scientists may remember at any given time. Thus, Mendel’s laws were forgotten until they were“rediscovered”. On the other hand, it may be the case that the total of scientific knowledge is less than the sum of what all scientists know since what scientists know is not uniformly consistent. That is, what some scientists know is sometimes at odds with what other scientists know – perhaps even contradictory– hence a reduction in total knowledge.3880
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Interestingly, the sum total of engineering knowledge does not seem to suffer from this problem. Contradictions do not seem to appear within the confines of the epistemology of engineering. There may be disagreements among engineers as to what is the most efficient solution to a problem but – given certain assumptions about the contingencies involved – it is not the case that two engineers similarly educated and experienced could be armed with sufficiently different perspectives that they would flat out contradict each other.
In this paper I examine some aspects of engineering knowledge in order to determine what it is that engineers know. A lot will depend on how we construe “knowledge”. I will argue for a pragmatic account of knowledge, in which based on the very grounds on which the claim of superiority is made for scientific knowledge, engineering knowledge is shown to be far more reliable than scientific knowledge – thereby exposing the lie in the traditional view that science is our best and most successful means of producing knowledge. I will begin with a quick sketch of a pragmatic theory of knowledge, followed by a look at scientific knowledge before turning to engineering knowledge. I conclude with a look at the fate of some tradition philosophical problems.
A Pragmatic Theory of Knowledge
Epistemology is an old topic and it remains stuck-in-a-rut. Since at least Plato, theories of knowledge have concentrated on one crucial factor – the inner mental state of a single individual. Prior to the work of David Hume that mental state was certainty. After Hume, empiricists abandoned certainty for some modified form of justified true belief. Nevertheless, the stress is still on what a single person knows. The view I am urging was first expressed in the work of Charles Saunders Peirce. The tradition Peirce founded extends through William James, John Dewey, C. I. Lewis, Nelson Goodman, W. V. O. Quine, Nicholas Rescher and, of course, Wilfrid Sellars, just to name a few. The simple idea they endorse in one form or another, is that to qualify as knowledge a proposition or set of propositions must be endorsed by an appropriate community. In Thinking About Technology (1999), I put it roughly this way: Individuals produce candidate claims for knowledge, and these candidates become knowledge once they are endorsed by the appropriate community using agreed upon standards.
This gives nothing to the Strong Programme sociologists, nor to the relativists – after all, Peirce was a realist. But it does relieve us from the fruitless tedium of devising doomed criteria by which we can determine whether an individual uttering a proposition with X, Y, and Z properties can be said to know something. The criteria are doomed because they ignore contingency, historical and otherwise. A pragmatic account, on the other hand, shifts the emphasis to, for example, the criteria that the scientific community has devised. But, even here, the criteria must meet some bottom line condition. For the pragmatist the bottom line is successful action. According to C.I. Lewis, “the utility of knowledge lies in the control it gives us, through appropriate action, over the quality of our future experience” (Lewis 1962, p. 4).