A post from one of my previous personae, Literally Engineering, from November 2020. I keep coming back to this one, and feel that the overall idea stands up well.

A field perspective of work and politics

Why think about work?

I was going to write about applying engineering methods to philosophy (I still plan to). Trouble was, as I got further into it, that post became more and more unwieldy as considerations popped up like: what are tools? and: what are engineers? (Philosophy, eh?) Since engineers work (as in - it’s our profession) that’s how I came to start writing about work itself, to provide a basis for those questions that, I hope, will let themselves be written about a little more easily. 

Remember: this a blog post, so it’s not definitive and I’m sure to return to the idea once I’ve read more into it (I’ve also just started reading James Suzman’s Work: A history of how we spend our time) - but… here goes!

Work: what is it good for? 

Fulfilling, defining, meaningful consumer of time; a source of satisfaction, stress and sleepless nights, of distraction from the finer points of life, or of structured relief from the chaos of family and friends, all of whom can also be… hard work. That’s work.

Have you had that experience, that if you fixate on a word in your mind for too long, it suddenly sounds ridiculous? “Work” ends up sounding like a frog’s croak or something. But before it reaches that stage, “work” can stimulate all kinds of hints and notions and emotions, whether we focus on its meaning as a verb or as a noun, or let it flicker between the two. Professions, occupations, undertakings, jobs, roles, tasks, responsibilities, duties, even hobbies and maintaining relationships: all these forms of work are, fundamentally, as in physics, a question of energy transfer. 

Without a potential or a gradient, energy will not flow. And in the case of work, without a start signal, nothing will cause that potential to rise. That potential is of a mental, emotional nature that can, at a certain threshold, signal the pumps to start up so that energy can be transferred to whatever objective we have in mind.

The signal, the “programming” of the operation and the action itself involve the bridging of some gap between a current state and a future imagined state. All of that together builds “work”.

Building up the model (this is also work)

It is feasible, if unrealistic, to consider the future imagined state being precisely the same as the current state (the defining word here being “imagined”). Practically speaking, we might think of this as being the notion of maintenance activities, but maintenance is still “real” work, requiring energy. For this “zero work” scenario, we would have to imagine someone sitting in a pleasantly perfect state, with no improvement or activity imaginable. Or someone who was dead, but that path doesn’t appear to lead to any useful conclusions.

Here’s what it might look like:

This state can only last to the point at which our character becomes bored, or uncomfortable, or wet or cold, or hungry, or needs relief from previous digestive activities. A tension arises, which spans the current scenario and an imagined future state:

The tension of intention

Right now, that character can “see” and hold a new, imagined, state, in mind - a “field of intention” sounds about right as a name for this - but nothing happens yet beyond some highly complex neurological and physiological changes that prime our character for action. Mental maps are generated of where the action should take place and where appropriate utensils might be found, a general concept of how the action might be completed is mentally sketched, as is an assessment of how much energy might be expended during the undertaking - which can also lead to the conclusion: “ah, forget it”. It’s only when an action occurs, however, and physical energy is expended, that the tension can be resolved, as in the sketch below:

The arrow represents some kind of action, and the new state is now “real” - though it may or may not be the one that was imagined. Smashed cups, bleeding fingers or unsaved work being lost are not generally part of our imagined states, but they happen.

There might be complications…

Of course, in real life, things aren’t as simple as a single pairing of state and new state: there are near unimaginable possibilities for work and potential new states are bubbling up continuously and almost simultaneously in our minds - a major stress factor in life is often “what to work on?”:

Sometimes the answer is clear, sometimes not. Sometimes just doing nothing is… very appealing. Typically, it is rare that we can complete one task to the exclusion of all others. In the course of a day, for example, we’ll meander from task to task, completing some, making progress on others, ignoring others still.

Each point along the meandering path actually represents a new state, where new possibilities arise, leading in some cases maybe to the sudden elimination of one possible task, or perhaps the creation of several more. This results in the “bubble” of imagined states taking on a different form (or, at least, content), with different intensities, at any point in time.

It’s the intensity, felt or understood emotionally as well as rationally, arising from all of these potential futures and actions that drives our decision making

Constraints set us free

This is not the place to discuss in depth the notion of freedom, but it seems pretty clear to most of us in these pandemic times that freedom to act also requires ensuring the safety and security of others to act. This implies social constraints that allow us to act upon our fields with confidence (because we and those around us know what is right) or - if we have nefarious or illegal intentions - we have to have to act below or around constraints, in secret, for example. These constraints also condition the array of imaginable future states. 

This all brings us to the next point in this - up to now - very simple sketch: other people.

If operating in society is sociable, then even engineers are sociable

Fortunately for most, to the chagrin of others, we humans don’t live or operate in isolation. We live and work within groups that build fields of tensions. Sometimes those tension fields align, and are complementary, like “we’re all hungry”, or “our spears are rubbish, we need new ones”, or “we should invest in education for our children” … and actions based on those tensions arise, not all of which - it has to be said - are complementary or coordinated, but the overall vector of which can target the imagined state:

These groups may be small or large, and come from all ends of the spectrum of human activities. Some groups will be our employers. Other groups may be colleagues in other departments acting as further constraints (Finance! Sales! Purchasing! Legal!). Groups can be companies in competition within an industry, or from different fields mutually assisting one another (e.g. engineers and medics), or mutually opposing each other (environmental activists and fossil fuel energy companies).

As groups encounter other groups, societies build up, and the fields of tension become more complex still. Politics arises (also, by necessity, within our companies of employment), providing guidance and structure / infrastructure, as well as constraints - and gets messy:

Sometimes societies are largely peaceful and are able to maintain a way of life via consensus and legitimate state power: some permit autocrats or populists to come to power, who need to create and highlight enemies both from outside their society, and from within, usually distinguished by race or religion (sigh), who need to be subjugated or expunged:

Pictorial rant aside; In any case, ideas arise from groups or individuals and need recruitment of others to perform actions with sufficient strength to achieve those goals. Recruitment also requires coordination or coercion, but these are ways of guiding or moulding the “intention field” of others.

The future imagined state from here?

The future imagined state of this blog is to have posts on what are engineers, what are tools, how the two interact, and, ultimately, for this series at least, to return to the original idea of applying engineering methods to philosophy.

Thinking back to groups: can they completely bypass each other? Perhaps, but it seems that technology and the engineers who develop it are a link to pretty much all areas of activity in the “developed” world. Think birdwatchers without the creators of binoculars or monster telescopic camera lenses. And that’s where I think we can fit engineers into society - who will be the subject of my next post.

Beginnings

Years ago, I mentioned to a French philosopher friend that I was thinking about setting up a blog about engineering. "Ah!", he replied, "so you're investigating the epistemology of engineering?"

Naturally I hadn't the faintest clue what he was talking about, though I may have given more of a non-commital "mmm-mmm" answer, rather than an "um." But the idea stuck and the kernel of an idea grew - more slowly than my enthusiasm for starting up the Literal Engineer and contributing to Engineer Blogs and Engineers Looking for Stuff. But whilst writing about PPAPs and DFMEAs had its merits, I realised that what I really wanted to think and write about was the "why" of what we do. And its meaning.

So I started putting this blog together in the summer of 2019; reading Simondon and Wikipedia; jotting down topics that I would want to cover over the coming years - and learning the absolute basics of WordPress (after an initial stab at hosting it on GitHub). The name in the URL, engiphy, came about because the original idea for a name, Onto Engineering, looks silly in a URL (ontoe... is in there). The blog is about Engineering... and Philosophy, and in that panic moment where the domain host asks for your preferred URL, I smashed the terms together. It kind of works. The title in the back of my mind remains Onto Engineering, reflecting the Ontology of engineering (another concept that needed a few clicks around Wikipedia and the web). But, here we are: I've started it and I'll probably never finish it. But I'm hoping for an interesting journey along the way, and not just for myself. Here's hoping you'll join me for the odd stretch or two. Why? I suppose we'll find out along the way!

What a job

I’m an engineer.

Of that I’m fairly sure. I studied engineering, got the degree though not the T-shirt, and have worked in the profession since the mid-1990s: but what exactly does it mean? Even after all this time in the profession, I would struggle to give a concise answer to the question: what is an engineer, actually? What is engineering?

We could list out a range of products that engineers have had a hand in creating through history (was there a first, an Ur-engineer?), and what we are developing at present (can you really engineer software?). We could list out all the different flavours of engineering that can be studied. I could make a list of all the activities I undertake to get a product out onto the market. I could make a list of all the documentation I (should) produce, all the processes and procedures I’m involved in (making for fascinating reading).

All of these perspectives - and more, no doubt - combine to make “engineering”, but how, and why? What do these things symbolise? Is there a common essence of engineering? What is not engineering? In what way do the things that I have learned, done, and produced combine to make me an engineer? Or, what about me makes me an engineer? Would I still be an engineer without the engagements with and from other groups like purchasing, sales, quality, as well as other engineers (process engineers who got the production lines to where they are, for example), and customers (with their own engineers, buyers, quality personnel… etc)? Alone, would I just be a tinkerer? Just a dreamer? Is an unemployed engineer still an engineer? Do the effects of engineering wear off after time? (Can I be cured of it?!)

Of course, just as a bird wouldn’t drop out of the sky if it suddenly realised that it didn’t quite understand how aerodynamics worked, an engineer doesn’t need to consider these questions to have a successful career: indeed, such thinking might even be incompatible with having a successful career – but it’s these sorts of questions that led me, over time, to start looking into the world of philosophy; to peer into the infinite rabbit hole and think: “That looks interesting…”

We engineers aren’t necessarily renowned for our reflections on the “meaning of all of this”, but when we roll our eyes at what we put ourselves through, all the demands that the engineering profession makes of us, this is also a fleeting form of reflection. I guess I’m just reflecting more than is usual.

Where it all didn’t begin

The only previous encounter I had with philosophy that I can recall before now is reading Sophie’s World once in my late teens. I think Dad had picked it up on a business trip, read it on the flight home, and passed it on to me. I’m sure I found it interesting, but although I did read it to the end, it didn’t leave a lasting impression. I fear I read it “wrong” in two ways: firstly, in expecting to end up “knowing” more by the time I’d finished; more for its points-scoring potential with my friends than for gaining profound insights into life. If the book contained any notion about philosophy being a journey, a way, rather than being a “thing-to-know”, or an “action”, it was lost on me. Secondly, I fear I read Sophie’s World wrong because philosophy seemed to run counter to my upbringing under the auspices of religion: I didn’t feel at the time that philosophy was really “allowed”. Any questions philosophy might have raised were already “answered”.

And that, pretty much, was that between philosophy and me for the next couple of decades.

Daunt you go there

Philosophers, as far as I knew, practically lived for unnecessarily complicated words like ontology, epistemology, hermeneutics and more. They seemed only able to express things in such tortured and obtuse language (laced with smatterings of German) that nobody could understand it, other than other professional philosophers (who at least knew how better to pretend to understand than we do).

When it wasn’t being incomprehensible, philosophy could be just downright silly.

Examples like the shadow play of Plato’s Allegory of the cave (also mentioned, as I recall, in Sophie’s World) cast philosophy into the form of a somewhat daft thought experiment without any practical use on how to act, to live my life or, eventually, how to study or think about engineering. Not a hint of it.

Mostly, though, like judges, philosophers simply come across as being out of touch with reality (although they do seem to “rediscover” it from time to time).

What has philosophy ever done for us?

It’s a bit of a struggle for an engineer to imagine how people make actual livings out of philosophy, other than by learning it and then teaching it. What’s the output, or, in that dreaded vernacular of ours: where’s the value-add? Clearly, though, humanity has managed to sustain and continue to develop philosophical thought throughout the centuries and through all manner of challenges, be they economic or ideological. The ways of thinking and of dialogue that philosophy enabled helped to widen and deepen our perceptions of what it is to be human. Philosophy has challenged engrained assumptions, created new ones, these in their turn to be challenged; ultimately, it spawned the idea of logic and the scientific method, enabled human rights to be valued, and provided a humanist (others might say cold and godless) way of contemplation and reflection, amongst other things. Most Westerners has heard of Aristotle and Plato. My knowledge of Eastern philosophy is limited to having heard of Confucius. Many have heard of Hannah Arendt or Martin Heidegger. Philosophy has its rock stars.

Equally, of course, philosophy doesn’t protect its practitioners from thundering idiocy: Heidegger, for example, was a committed and unapologetic Nazi. Even in the 1980s, the British philosopher and polemicist Roger Scruton was talking about the “swinish multitudes” who clearly didn’t understand or accept their place in society.

Perhaps unexpectedly, though, philosophy is still a thing; young people study it! At Oxford University in 2018, nearly 8% of students had Philosophy in their course title (combined in studies with psychology and linguistics (PPL); politics and economics (PPE), Physics and Philosophy (40 students!), and Philosophy and Theology). In Germany in 2019, 21k from a total of around 1.6M students were enrolled in philosophy courses, giving a perhaps more realistic 1.2%. There also seems to be a general level of acceptance that the mental skillset that philosophers gain during their studies is valued in the job market – just not in engineering.

I am not a philosopher.

Of that I am very sure. At least it seems a more realistic prospect for an engineer to become an amateur philosopher than for a philosopher to be an amateur engineer (assuming we could define the latter). I like to think that the potential for damage is smaller this way around.

Do you absolutely have to write about it?

Reading about philosophy is one thing, but it’s something else entirely to try and state your own case in your own words. The whole challenge of philosophy lies in converting some rather diffuse thoughts and feelings about a matter into cogent words that could be understood by others.

And this is where you, the reader come in. You’re my sounding board, even if you never read this. If you do end up reading this, then we will have entered into a dialogue, even if you never respond. And if you do respond - then things can really come to life.

The other thing that I’ve noticed so far is that philosophers are totally focussed on words. They seem incapable of sketching or drawing their concepts into images or flows or maps: structured thinking and sketching tends to be an important engineering tool, and it’s an idea that I’d like to pursue as I progress with this blog, though not for this post – this is a wordy one.

What: All of philosophy?

In a word, no. In two words, no: but. My intention is to focus on “just” engineering - but its connections to and overlaps with science, technology in general, nature, companies, economics, ethics and society mean that it’s impossible to view engineering in isolation. This in turn means that, right now, it’s difficult to set the scope, to create a definitive boundary diagram for this particular investigation.

Go on, then, get to the point

The point that I am slowly uncovering is that there isn’t a point. It’s a whole plane of investigation, probably even several planes. Or a sphere. Or an unbounded universe of thought… I don’t know! Philosophy involves trying to analyse and describe the many interactions, intersections and interfaces of being, with humans at its centre. But, whilst philosophy provided us with the concept of logic, it doesn’t tend to provide algorithms.

The perspective that appeals to me at present is Aristotle’s one of working towards a common “good”, this being whatever is expected of our community. Define community? Exactly – a challenge! Define “good”? Even harder! We as engineers are associated with many communities, and it’s up to us to reflect on how deep and wide the “goods” of our actions are transmitted.

Questioning and dialogue seem to be the philosophical way of analysing our own satisfactions and frustrations around the business of engineering, and these are methods that I will bear in mind as I progress.

There are unresolvable tensions to acknowledge, different forms of knowledge itself, phases of being and becoming, awareness of the concepts of interpretation and understanding, agency and ethics, to name a few of the major points that I’ll be delving into, irregularly, over time.

The point of the point being?

To put it concisely (this being the first attempt at describing why I’m doing this):

I am starting a philosophical investigation into engineering to help myself - and, potentially, others - to reflect on what it is we put ourselves through as engineers, and why. To reflect on and, perhaps, even, to begin to understand, our methods and our outputs into society.

Also, one quote I recently encountered seems apt, if wrong:

‘There is nothing in philosophy which could not be said in everyday language.’ Henri Bergson

Right now, though, I’m right at the beginning of the journey. Since that one offhand comment from a friend of ours a few years ago sparked things off, I have read some of the simpler travel guides, started to learn a few words from a phrasebook and browsed through some of the highlights online. But I don’t have an itinerary, let alone a destination.

Did someone bring the map?

Epistemology

Knowledgeology

Ontology

What-reallyology

Phenomenology

Affectology

Joseph Dunne: Back to the Rough Ground

This book has become foundational to me. Joseph Dunne was led to write this book in response to a popular theory of education at one point, behavioural objective, essentially a highly "rational", target-based, skill-based theory of teaching. Dunne felt at heart that it was wrong and wanted to explore the philosophical basis for his discomfort with it. His book enters "conversations" with 5 key philosophers, and finds the heart of the matter in Aristotle's ideas on action and knowledge:

• practical versus theoretical knowledge
  • techne versus phronesis
• goal-focussed versus political (societal) action
  • poeisis vs praxis
• 5 philosophers:
  • John Henry Newman
  • R.G. Collingwood
  • Hannah Arendt
  • Hans-Georg Gadamer
  • Jürgen Habermas

Carl Mitcham: Thinking Through Technolgy - The Path Between Engineering and Philosophy

Another foundational book, Carl Mitcham sweeps through the history of philosophical thought surrounding technology (and, to a subordinate extent, engineering). He argues for a relationship between "Engineering philosophy of technology" and "Humanities philosophy of technology": the engineers aren't philosophical pros, but the philosophers aren't practised in the world of engineering or technology

Gilbert Simondon: On the mode of being of technical objects

This thesis by the French philosopher of the 1950s was one of the first texts that I encountered when I first started to dip into the world of philosophy. Unfortunately, I can't recreate the search terms I used back then (2012, I think): perhaps the algorithms have changed since then. But this work provided a useful first hurdle into the language of (translated) philosophy - it was baffling at first, but slowly I began to understand what he meant with terms like

• concrete vs abstract
• ontology and ontogenesis
• transduction...

All rather baffling, but slowly it started to make sense - especially when returning to it having read rather more about it now!

Kevin Kelly: What Technology Wants

Another relatively early read, prior to actually doing anything about my philosophical delusions. An enjoyable run through how technology has vastly improved the human lot; how more humanity speeds up the potential for more technology; how technology is (and this sounds almost esoteric) another form of being - although Gilbert Simondon beat him to that notion, Kelly's book takes the evolution of the technological being right through to the beginning of the universe

Isabelle Stengers: The Invention of Modern Science

A survey of thinking about science (interesting because of the distinction between science and technology) - not really got far into this text so far

Peter-Paul Verbeek: What Things Do

Not read very far yet... A study into the philosophy of technology with a focus on technological artifacts, in contrast to 'classical' philosophy of technology, which was actually more focussed on society, alienation and 'mass culture'

Don Ihde: Husserl's Missing Technologies

An enjoyable survey of how Husserl's initial model of phenomenology (i.e., how humans experience the activity they partake in, and how that experience guides the activity) focussed on the theoretical side of science, whilst seemingly missing completely the fundamental role that tools (or instruments) play in the development of sciences. Husserl's Galileo had numbers and formulae, but no telescope.

James Suzman: Work - A History of How We Spend Our Time

Just started reading this, too: still at the phase of how and why nature seemingly wastes energy (when energy is abundant)

The Murder of Professor Schlick - The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle

December 2022 - Jan 2023

The Vienna Circle was a group of philosophers including Moritz Schlick (who was murdered, shot by a paranoid ex-student), Otto Neurath, Rudolph Carnap among others, which also brought such luminaries as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Popper, Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel into its orbit, who worked mainly on the principle of logical positivism, as set against metaphysics: this became a political and racial environment through their being set against the quasi-religious ideologies of fascism and Nazism (which made liberal use of myth and metaphysics), and the majority of their membership being Jewish.

It's not an engineering-adjacent work, but the debates they had about verification, falsifiability, about the rootedness of our thinking in language and how, if at all, to escape that into pure logic and data... it raises interesting questions, and enriches my own thinking on engineering and technology.

Interesting to note, too, one key unifying factor within that Circle: their hatred of Heidegger (a major figure in P.-P. Verbeek's What Things Do, mentioned above)

EXTENDED BODY:

A retweet by Peter-Paul Verbeek (@ppverbeek) about a new book on Asian perspectives on technology by Pak-Hang Wong and Tom Xiaowei Wang, Harmonious Technology, A Confucian Ethics of Technology (which I have just preordered), also led me to discover that Carl Mitcham (who had provided "blurb" for Pak-Hang Wong's book) had also recently published a new book, Steps Toward a Philosophy of Engineering (which I have just ordered) .

As a complete amateur in the world of philosophy, there's always a sense of "why don't I give up and just read the books by the Pros?" But that would be to misunderstand philosophy; examining the life, generating our own perspectives and networks, as well as inklings of understanding, is what it's all about. The Mitchams and Verbeeks of the world can act as the fundamental physicists of life: they can discover the links and the meanings that enrich our lives, whilst we can endeavour to make use of whichever tools they fashion in the best way that we can.

And, who knows, perhaps we'll end up contributing to the design and development, the evolution of those tools, too!

As it happens, my next post is all about tools...

Or: thinking about knowing

What do engineers know?

It turns out to be a suprisingly teasing, puzzling sort of a question, once you start going down that rabbit hole. Right now, I’m still fiddling for my torch, head poked curiously and warily down that dark burrow, but the call of exploration is strong…

Umm, anyway, back to the question: what do we know?

Individually, throughout our careers, we gain experience - and various forms of knowledge - at different levels (trainee, perhaps, associate program engineer, senior engineer, etc) and on different products. These career journeys of ours also take in various cultures (teams, divisions, usually different companies, too). Through all of that we collect and sort, sift and forget all sorts of knowledge. We gain skills and, with luck, wisdom and forebearance to boot.

Collectively, as a profession - well, that’s when it almost gets scary: we “know” all of technology and influence pretty much everything in human life, which can be simultaneously a heartening and a most daunting proposition.

We tend to be incorrigible dabblers, too, picking up tidbits of information beyond our strict remit or job description as we try out physics, chemistry, patent law, software and programming, logistics, library and knowledge methods, sales and even purchasing to name a few areas where we tread, sometimes indelicately, on others’ expertise: case in point, here I am, dabbling in philosophy, for better or for worse.

Fortunately, although outsiders would lump us into a great ignorant and poorly-spelling whole, engineers are also not the same: there are lifelong specialists, and there are generalists, there are documentationalists and there are the more carefree types who can make great gains in their projects but end up all flustered when audits come around; there are process specialists and product specialists, component and systems engineers, quality engineers, to name but a few types - all of whom know things, often in extremely different ways.

As with all professions, we are full of rich, deep, wide, shallow and patchy knowledge.

Given this enormous spectrum of knowledge that we encounter, perhaps the more efficient question is then less what do we know and more how do we know it? In what ways do we know things? Do engineers possess different forms of knowledge to other professionals, or at least a different mix of knowledges? Is the full spectrum of engineering knowledge distinguishable from that of scientists, or lawyers? How do experience and expectations affect how we apply our knowledge?

Knowledgeology - philosophy to the rescue!

Not unexpectedly, there’s a branch of philosophy associated with pondering these questions about knowledge; equally unsurprisingly it has an Ancient Greek-based title, epistemology. If we wanted to, though, I’m sure we could call it knowledgology and kind of get away with it, knowing pretty much straight away what we’re talking about. If we’re still uncomfortable about the residual Greek -ology suffix, then we’re looking at a defining phrase for what we’re talking about here: I’d say it’s about how knowledge can be understood and in what ways defined.

Is it now just a case of reading the manual and letting philosophy answer our questions? Well, even less surprisingly than the fact that there is this branch of philosophy, there doesn’t appear to be a clear-cut answer to anything. But, as I’ll keep coming back to on this blog, that’s kind of the point of philosophy; it’s intriguing and fun in a rather odd way, to keep thinking, reflecting, and searching about and around these concepts.

Basically, though, epistemology asks the questions: what forms of knowledge are there? And how can we test if something actually is knowledge?

What the experts say

As a preternatural dabbler, I at least know to defer to the experts first when I start exploring a topic. Here, I’ve looked at the Wikipedia entry on epistemology, as well as Stanford University’s “Plato” Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s more in-depth article on epistemology.

As a quick first overview:

• Knowledge has five potential sources:
  • Perception
  • Introspection
  • Memory
  • Reason
  • Testimony
• Three further factors are required to convert concepts into knowledge:
  • Truth
  • Belief
  • Justification

One more aspect is required, something that links philosophy to psychology and how our minds work; we require some way of making those beliefs feel justified.

We could also add the engineering perspective of “buildability” to a concept: if something is true in an engineering sense, then it can be made and tested or modelled and simulated.

Truth and trust

Already we have encountered a challenging concept that we normally don’t reflect upon all that much in engineering; truth… Naturally, we’re not journalists or politicians, so more of what we test and develop has the potential for relatively simple appraisal of whether something is truthful or not. Equally, though, market and business pressures can lead to pressures in stating things, and managing how things are stated. Add to that the complexity of modern systems and you have the potential for partial truths, and therefore partial knowledge, leading to only partially correct decisions; the Boeing 737 Max and Volkswagen’s “Dieselgate” would be pretty clear examples of such edge cases.

Indeed, in my field, almost more important than truth is trust - the clearest example that I can think of is corrosion testing: test results can look so ugly and are often so debatable that it can take years for companies to accept the reality of corrosion test results and their applicability (more often: inapplicability) to real-world useage.

Feel the knowledge!

As hinted at above, one fundamental knowledge metric is justification and the feeling thereof. From my early reading, it looks like there might be different feelings of justification depending on the sort of work you’re doing, because there are different types of knowledge. Joseph Dunne in his book Back to the Rough Ground focuses on Aristotle’s two concepts of activity and their respective knowledge types:

• poiesis and its knowledge type techne
• praxis and its knowledge type phronesis

Waa, more Greek! What do these concepts mean, and how are they relevant to engineers? I’ll try and explain:

Poiesis

It sounds confusingly like poetry, but it’s actually more the complete opposite: poiesis is the type of activity that is performed when a particular outcome or state is desired, upon particular materials - a built house, a well person, a tool, a mass-produced product.

It’s an activity that engineers would most associate with meeting drawings and specifications.

The type of knowledge associated with poiesis is techne. It’s the sort of internalised, very technical knowledge with which experienced and skilled experts “glide” through their work with precision and efficiency.

Praxis

I still get this mixed up with poiesis, because it sounds more “practical.” What it really refers to is the type of activity that occurs in a society, a community (or a culture, like engineering), an activity that is generally perceived to be in aid of achieving “excellence”, as defined by that community or culture, even when the outcome doesn’t assume a particular form.

The type of knowledge associated with praxis is phronesis. It’s a more creative, unstructured state of knowledge and work. If techne allows technicians to read drawings and to make the products that they describe, phronesis is perhaps better associated with the processes of getting products to that described state - the searching, the trials and errors, the insights into science and their application to this particular problem, suddenly remembering and bringing individual or corporate know-how to the fore, making connections between disparate facts or events to come to a solution, or a new product.

De-Greeking, De-Geeking the words

Do we need to remember those Greek words? I find myself becoming ever more used to them - so perhaps I’m at the early stages of “going native” (alternatively, a good dabbler is also a good bluffer…) But perhaps there’s another way of describing those concepts in modernish: here’s a first go!

I’ll definitely have to come back to these “definitions” again, but I think I’m getting the picture - I hope you are, too!

Accessus footnote

What’s this? Accessus was a template that I encountered when researching epistemology. It was used as a means of “tagging” and classifying works

• Who (is the author) (quis/persona)? Sebastian Abbott
• What (is the subject matter of the text) (quid/materia)? Knowledge, techne, phronesis, epistemology
• Why (was the text written) (cur/causa)? To begin the stage of asking the right questions and understanding basic concepts
• How (was the text composed) (quomodo/modus)? In many small sessions, interspersed by further reading
• When (was the text written or published) (quando/tempus)? January - February 2020
• Where (was the text written or published) (ubi/loco)? In several locations: home and work
• By which means (was the text written or published) (quibus faculatibus/facultas)? On my MacBook Air, a little on the PC, some on the Gemini, mainly using SublimeText and iA Writer software

A field perspective of work and politics

Why think about work?

I was going to write about applying engineering methods to philosophy (I still plan to). Trouble was, as I got further into it, that post became more and more unwieldy as considerations popped up like: what are tools? and: what are engineers? (Philosophy, eh?) Since engineers work (as in - it’s our profession) that’s how I came to start writing about work itself, to provide a basis for those questions that, I hope, will let themselves be written about a little more easily. 

Remember: this a blog post, so it’s not definitive and I’m sure to return to the idea once I’ve read more into it (I’ve also just started reading James Suzman’s Work: A history of how we spend our time) - but… here goes!

Work: what is it good for? 

Fulfilling, defining, meaningful consumer of time; a source of satisfaction, stress and sleepless nights, of distraction from the finer points of life, or of structured relief from the chaos of family and friends, all of whom can also be… hard work. That’s work.

Have you had that experience, that if you fixate on a word in your mind for too long, it suddenly sounds ridiculous? “Work” ends up sounding like a frog’s croak or something. But before it reaches that stage, “work” can stimulate all kinds of hints and notions and emotions, whether we focus on its meaning as a verb or as a noun, or let it flicker between the two. Professions, occupations, undertakings, jobs, roles, tasks, responsibilities, duties, even hobbies and maintaining relationships: all these forms of work are, fundamentally, as in physics, a question of energy transfer. 

Without a potential or a gradient, energy will not flow. And in the case of work, without a start signal, nothing will cause that potential to rise. That potential is of a mental, emotional nature that can, at a certain threshold, signal the pumps to start up so that energy can be transferred to whatever objective we have in mind.

The signal, the “programming” of the operation and the action itself involve the bridging of some gap between a current state and a future imagined state. All of that together builds "work".

Building up the model (this is also work)

It is feasible, if unrealistic, to consider the future imagined state being precisely the same as the current state (the defining word here being “imagined”). Practically speaking, we might think of this as being the notion of maintenance activities, but maintenance is still “real” work, requiring energy. For this “zero work” scenario, we would have to imagine someone sitting in a pleasantly perfect state, with no improvement or activity imaginable. Or someone who was dead, but that path doesn’t appear to lead to any useful conclusions.

Here’s what it might look like:

This state can only last to the point at which our character becomes bored, or uncomfortable, or wet or cold, or hungry, or needs relief from previous digestive activities. A tension arises, which spans the current scenario and an imagined future state:

The tension of intention

Right now, that character can “see” and hold a new, imagined, state, in mind - a “field of intention” sounds about right as a name for this - but nothing happens yet beyond some highly complex neurological and physiological changes that prime our character for action. Mental maps are generated of where the action should take place and where appropriate utensils might be found, a general concept of how the action might be completed is mentally sketched, as is an assessment of how much energy might be expended during the undertaking - which can also lead to the conclusion: “ah, forget it”. It’s only when an action occurs, however, and physical energy is expended, that the tension can be resolved, as in the sketch below:

The arrow represents some kind of action, and the new state is now “real” - though it may or may not be the one that was imagined. Smashed cups, bleeding fingers or unsaved work being lost are not generally part of our imagined states, but they happen.

There might be complications...

Of course, in real life, things aren’t as simple as a single pairing of state and new state: there are near unimaginable possibilities for work and potential new states are bubbling up continuously and almost simultaneously in our minds - a major stress factor in life is often “what to work on?”:

Sometimes the answer is clear, sometimes not. Sometimes just doing nothing is… very appealing. Typically, it is rare that we can complete one task to the exclusion of all others. In the course of a day, for example, we’ll meander from task to task, completing some, making progress on others, ignoring others still.

Each point along the meandering path actually represents a new state, where new possibilities arise, leading in some cases maybe to the sudden elimination of one possible task, or perhaps the creation of several more. This results in the “bubble” of imagined states taking on a different form (or, at least, content), with different intensities, at any point in time.

It’s the intensity, felt or understood emotionally as well as rationally, arising from all of these potential futures and actions that drives our decision making

Constraints set us free

This is not the place to discuss in depth the notion of freedom, but it seems pretty clear to most of us in these pandemic times that freedom to act also requires ensuring the safety and security of others to act. This implies social constraints that allow us to act upon our fields with confidence (because we and those around us know what is right) or - if we have nefarious or illegal intentions - we have to have to act below or around constraints, in secret, for example. These constraints also condition the array of imaginable future states. 

This all brings us to the next point in this - up to now - very simple sketch: other people.

If operating in society is sociable, then even engineers are sociable

Fortunately for most, to the chagrin of others, we humans don’t live or operate in isolation. We live and work within groups that build fields of tensions. Sometimes those tension fields align, and are complementary, like “we’re all hungry”, or “our spears are rubbish, we need new ones”, or “we should invest in education for our children” … and actions based on those tensions arise, not all of which - it has to be said - are complementary or coordinated, but the overall vector of which can target the imagined state:

These groups may be small or large, and come from all ends of the spectrum of human activities. Some groups will be our employers. Other groups may be colleagues in other departments acting as further constraints (Finance! Sales! Purchasing! Legal!). Groups can be companies in competition within an industry, or from different fields mutually assisting one another (e.g. engineers and medics), or mutually opposing each other (environmental activists and fossil fuel energy companies).

As groups encounter other groups, societies build up, and the fields of tension become more complex still. Politics arises (also, by necessity, within our companies of employment), providing guidance and structure / infrastructure, as well as constraints - and gets messy:

Sometimes societies are largely peaceful and are able to maintain a way of life via consensus and legitimate state power: some permit autocrats or populists to come to power, who need to create and highlight enemies both from outside their society, and from within, usually distinguished by race or religion (sigh), who need to be subjugated or expunged:

Pictorial rant aside; In any case, ideas arise from groups or individuals and need recruitment of others to perform actions with sufficient strength to achieve those goals. Recruitment also requires coordination or coercion, but these are ways of guiding or moulding the “intention field” of others.

The future imagined state from here?

The future imagined state of this blog is to have posts on what are engineers, what are tools, how the two interact, and, ultimately, for this series at least, to return to the original idea of applying engineering methods to philosophy.

Thinking back to groups: can they completely bypass each other? Perhaps, but it seems that technology and the engineers who develop it are a link to pretty much all areas of activity in the “developed” world. Think birdwatchers without the creators of binoculars or monster telescopic camera lenses. And that’s where I think we can fit engineers into society - who will be the subject of my next post.

Reading Daniel C. Dennett’s book From bacteria to Bach and back, I encountered the following quotes, which fit in quite well to the "why philosophy" question I asked in my previous post:

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Socrates

and:

“The over-examined life is nothing to write home about either.”

Kurt Baier

These quotes give an inkling of the lower and upper boundary limits for a philosophical examination of engineering, though we can’t on this basis consider the upper specification level to be defined in the slightest.

Equally, the notion of “examination” itself is also very loose, varying between the possibilities of scientific and cultural, energetic and ethical modes or perspectives.

I’ll take Baier’s comment as a warning (an upper control limit rather than a specification limit), as something to take to heart, as we all have jobs to do, lives outside of engineering to live, without overthinking things…

(Aristotle’s notion of praxis, of living life in the world, with all its undefinable skills and interactions, remains as valid as ever)

It's well worth noting one further critical aspect here - Socrates I think is implying a human life in his statement. Animal and plant life is by its "nature" unexamined, but is not "not worth" living. Natural life has its own intrinsic worth in distinguishing our planet from any other that we have ever spotted, and it provided the building blocks that resulted in the evolution of us humans.

In terms of human life, the word "worth" is also laden with meaning(s): "not worth" is a dangerous thought, no matter how lightly or specifically Socrates actually meant it. Which is why, at this stage, I'm content to stay at the level of the engineering life, and whatever Socrates' phrase might mean to you, as well as to me.

To paraphrase into our world: "the unexamined life in engineering gets us paid, but can lead to a dead end."