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The ultimate aim of scientific inquiry is explanation. Thus, in the context of a pragmatic account, the ultimate success of the use of scientific knowledge is explanation. We use a theory to explore a domain of objects, sorting out their various relations for the purpose of explaining what can't be explained otherwise by appeal to the activities of the objects in that domain. Why is a tabletop hard? To answer that question we have found that we need to appeal to a scientific theory which proposes that there is a domain of smaller objects which are held together by a series of forces and that it is because of the forces and objects in that micro-domain that our phenomenological report of a hard table is possible. The aim of science is to help us understand the way the world appears to us, and it accomplishes this aim by constructing and testing theories which appeal to features of the world which are not immediately obvious.
There are other aspects of scientific knowledge which are essential to its vitality, but they need not be of concern here. In order to have a fruitful starting point to investigate the nature of engineering knowledge we need only concentrate on these two features; (1) Scientific knowledge is theory bound, and (2) scientific knowledge is developed to explain the way the world works. Unfortunately, while the process of trial and error and reappraisal characteristic of scientific activity seems to reveal its strength, this process also serves to undermine its claim of epistemic superiority over engineering knowledge. Likewise – as we shall see – the theory-bound nature of scientific knowledge creates a number of problems that do not plague engineering knowledge.
Engineering Knowledge
In What Engineers Know and How they Know it (1988), Walter Vincenti identifies and develops a theme first introduced by Edwin Layton in his landmark paper "Technology as Knowledge." Vincenti provides an account of engineering knowledge from the point of view of a practicing and deeply reflective engineer. Both Layton and Vincenti endorse the view that engineering knowledge – and technological knowledge in general – constitutes a discrete form of knowledge that is different from scientific knowledge. In a later piece, his classic 1987 Society for the History of Technology Presidential Address, "Through the Looking Glass or News from Lake Mirror Image," Layton endorses the findings of A.R. Hall, and claims that "technological knowledge is knowledge of how to do or make things, whereas the basic sciences have a more general form of knowing." (Layton 1987, p. 603) Vincenti echoes this, invoking Gilbert Ryle's famous distinction between knowing how (technology) and knowing that (science).
Both Layton and Vincenti are concerned to defend the view that – while both science and technology may borrow from or rely on each other in various ways – they constitute two distinct forms of knowledge since they aim at different ends. Science aims to explain and technology/engineering aims to create artifices. Vincenti puts it this way, "technology, though it may apply science, is not the same as or entirely applied science" (Vincenti 1990, p. 4). He defends this claim in part with an intriguing and highly suggestive proposal. As he sees it, if we start with the proposition that technology is applied science, then there is no possibility of considering the view that technology could involve an autonomous form of knowledge that could account for those technological achievements which are science independent – such as the pyramids of Egypt and the roads of ancient Rome. Given the existence of highly visible science- independent technologies, we have good reasons to believe that we should not characterize technology as merely applied science. It is does not follow from the fact that science and technology each has occasion to rely on the other, nor that one is a subset of the other. Assuming is quasi-autonomous from, what can we say about the distinctive nature of engineering knowledge as a specific form of technological knowledge?