Stuff. Is that the best word I could come up with to start my philosophically tinged blog on the nature of engineering? Well, at present, it is. It’s the best. Up to now, I’ve been reading more than I have been writing, and in all honesty, “stuff” seems, as a word to use, more human, more engaging, simply more meaningful, than plenty of other words that I have encountered in my early reading into the philosophy of engineering.
Who’s talking about whom?
One fascinating subject that I have encountered, and one I am sure I’ll come back to quite often, is whether it is more valid for professional philosophers to philosophise about engineering than it is for professional engineers to “try” and philosophise about their own metier (which is, naturally, what I’m up to here). At present, in my current, extremely limited state of philosophical fluency, the vocabulary that philosophers use looks to me to be as technical, as opaque, as anything that I’ve encountered in engineering. It’s as if philosophers are talking to themselves about us: we’re the specimens in the lab and they are the all-knowing experts looking in and occasionally prodding. Looking back through the bars at what they have produced in writing (do philosophers have any other form of output?), I have the impression that if philosophers love one thing, it’s the exquisite agony of defining words exquisitely.
Those “omniscient experts” just seem to be talking to themselves. Therein lies the appeal of the word “stuff” to me right now: it’s maybe an overly familiar word, but it has the charm of being familiar, and carrying with it a rather vague set of meanings, so I’m not totally nailing somthing down too soon. I could equally assign a letter to represent the thing I’m referring to: F (we tend not to use S because of 5). Or, even better, something Greek: [\theta].
Back to the Stuff at hand
What I’m referring to with the word “Stuff” - or F - is the things that humanity makes. This means that F is a subset of “things”. Nature makes plenty of things without our intervention - but nature doesn’t make “stuff.” We do that, all by ourselves.
We don’t tend to give “Stuff” all that much thought, unless we’re going to be buying more of it and want to make a choice. An awful lot of Stuff is just there (indeed, an awful lot of Stuff is junk, or “tat” - but that’s something we’ll have to think about more deeply another time). Yet all of this stuff has been designed, developed (in various ways), made, and, increasingly, engineered. With all our concerns about energy consumption, efficiency and emissions these days, engineers have ethical questions to answer, along with the industries we serve: is cattle farming - or, more precisely, its outputs like cheese or beef, for example - “Stuff”, and can it be better engineered? But generally, most Stuff ends up as background noise to most people, like the fridge in the kitchen that you only notice when the compressor switches off.
It has become normal for us, even as engineers, to work on F or to use it without pausing to ponder the “what does it mean” of our endeavours. Others have done this in the past, and continue to do so now. These others are professionals, too: their job is thinking. That leads to another train of thought that stems from business: is a philosopher’s work an opportunity cost? Could they have been better put to use doing something other than “just” thinking, writing and publishing?
That’s something I’d also like to consider over the course of this blog.
The Languaging of Experience
I may have appeared to be a little scathing about philosophers’ use of words, but I also need to take care with my choice of words, and how they are packed into the text that I’m hoping to use to transmit my thoughts or experiences to you. So, I will be as careful as I can be - and gladly accept any criticism of vagueness or confusion generated through my choices. If I were to be grammatically correct about it, the title of this post should be “Here is Stuff”, taking “Stuff” as a singular word denoting the plural - but because “Here Be…” just sounds better, more piratey, than “Here Is”, that’s how I’ll take it for now. Arr.
What am I doing, again?
I’ll do lots of reading. I’ll list out the reading I’ve done, and estimate how much I have understood what I read. I’ll write posts on thoughts that arise from that reading, as well as from my own engineering experiences under this new perspective; posts on various topics and concepts that I stumble across during these hobbyish endeavours. Perhaps something will form out of it: an idea, a concept that might help me, possibly even a reader, to understand a little more the “why” of what we, as engineers, do.
This is all at the risk that it might all have been my very own opportunity cost, too; I should have been practicing the trombone instead.
Sorry.
(especially to the design and process engineers who designed, developed and made my particular trombone, to the engineers who designed and validated the materials in roads and ships, to the developers of the logistics systems, of the barcode readers and truck tyres that, together, managed to get my trombone to me. To the printers of music, the extruders of aluminium music stand components - and to the makers of earplugs.)
