Abstract
In this chapter I draw on philosophical literature on (scientific) explanation to assess the goodness of engineering design methods. I focus this analysis on the engineering design practice of reverse engineering and redesign, and elaborate a constraint drawn from the mechanistic explanation literature to assess the goodness of reverse engineering practices and the content of design representations resulting from those practices. This constraint concerns the distinction between causal and constitutive relevance in mechanisms. I spell out two ways in which constitutive relevance assessments give traction to designing: reverse engineering explanation, and design optimization. I end by showing how this analysis fits within and extends recent philosophical work on the interplay between engineering design and explanation, indicating the (broader) relevance and promise of connecting philosophy of explanation and philosophy of design.
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Notes
- 1.
The precise lingo differs; some speak about ‘entities’ and ‘activities’, others ‘working parts’ and ‘operations’, yet others ‘capacities’. These differences need not concern us here.
- 2.
Other techniques used in experimental practice and discussed in the literature, concern ‘schema instantiation’ in which abstract mechanism schemata are made less abstract and applied to particular cases, ‘forward-backward chaining’ in which gaps in the stages of a mechanism’s operation are filled in terms of knowledge of a mechanism’s operation in preceding and succeeding stages, respectively (Darden 2002; Darden and Craver 2002), and ‘modular subassembly’ in which known types of mechanistic modules are assembled to form a hypothetical mechanistic model (Darden 2002). These procedures depend, of course, on mechanistic knowledge procured by earlier functional and structural decompositions and localizations.
- 3.
Of course, the interactions between component parts and operations in a mechanism are causal; the relationship between these components parts and processes and a mechanism’s overall behavior (the explanandum phenomenon) is constitutive, i.e., non-causal.
- 4.
To be sure, as mentioned, most have it that the interactions between component parts and processes in mechanisms are causal; the relationships between component parts and processes and overall behaviors of mechanisms are non-causal, constitutive relationships (but see Leuridan 2012 for an alternative construal).
- 5.
- 6.
I my view, user actions are never constituents of technical mechanisms (whereas there are cases in which, by my lights, bodily movements are constituents in cognitive systems-mechanisms (Van Eck and Looren de Jong 2016). I suspect that each case, when regimented in term of mutual manipulability and fat handedness, will support this claim. Although giving a thorough defense for this claim is beyond the scope of this chapter, consider a brief additional example in support of this view. A good-old fashioned hand-operated screwdriver – without batteries or electrical wiring – that solely works by applying human force and hand-directed movements. By definition, such artifacts do not drive/remove screws when they are not manually used: user actions are vital to its operation. Yet, one can intervene on ‘its driving/removing screws’ function by, say, making the tip of the screwdriver sharper or blunter. This intervention does not elicit immediate, synchronous changes in user actions concerning the manual operation of the artifact (this intervention can, of course, cause temporally later hand-directed operation of the artifact to be more or less smooth). So, surgical cause- interventions here (again) exist which block constituency claims with respect to user actions.
- 7.
I use the term design representation in a broad sense, which may include models qua diagrams, physical models, drawings, cardboard models, etc. In addition, design representations may refer to extant artifacts as well as designs of to-be-built artifacts. Only the former have truth conditions; the latter cannot be assessed in terms of alethic criteria (see note 9).
- 8.
- 9.
Although the truth makers of answers to these questions are facts about artifacts that in a design phase still have to be build (and interventions on them, such as the replacement of components), answers can still be given to these questions in the design phase, the plausibility of which derives from sound knowledge of past designs, artifacts that have been built in terms of these designs, and scientific and technological principles governing them. Design models or representations thus assist in counterfactual understanding, and the understanding they procure in design phases can be assessed in terms of their plausibility. Alethic norms do not govern such assessments in cases were the artifact has not yet been built/produced (nevertheless such counterfactual understanding may lead to improved designs when plausible answers to what-if questions result in the selection of other, better components in the design phase than the ones originally conceived of) (van Eck 2015b).
- 10.
Since mutual manipulability concerns interventions on extant systems, I restrict the application of mutual manipulability to robustness testing to extant technical systems and novel physical prototypes of technical systems. A lot of comparative work in Otto and Wood’s method (1998, 2000), in addition to comparing extant systems with novel physical prototypes, concerns the counterfactual comparison between extant systems and conceptual redesigns with respect to the functional performance of extant and hypothesized components of these systems and redesigns. One cannot factually intervene on conceptual (re)designs of course.
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I thank Pieter Vermaas for useful comments on previous versions of this chapter.
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van Eck, D. (2018). On Testing Engineering Design Methods: Explanation, Reverse Engineering, and Constitutive Relevance. In: Vermaas, P., Vial, S. (eds) Advancements in the Philosophy of Design. Design Research Foundations. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73302-9_17
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