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!
| Geeky Greeky | Amateur’s English | What’s the meaning of this? |
|---|---|---|
| Poiesis | Doing things right | Activity with a specific technical goal |
| – Techne | Skills, aptitude | Knowledge applied to a specific goal |
| Praxis | Doing the right things right by others | Activity with a general social goal |
| – Phronesis | Generous, lively wisdom | Unstructured, creative knowledge |
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
