Abstract
This article comes at a point in my work that is both advantageous and awkward. The awkwardness comes from the fact that I have recently published a book under the title What Engineers Know and How They Know It (hence the allusion in the title of the present piece). 1 This book contains most of what I think I know about what engineers know, and what I offer here will not be essentially new. The advantages arise because, like most authors, I have been having second thoughts about what I have written and about ideas I think I see more clearly now. I shall attempt here to repackage and summarize those ideas in a way that — I hope — will make more explicit the historiographic and epistemological structure behind them. This structure did not appear so clearly when I was occupied with the nuts and bolts of the work. A diagram has also occurred to me that embodies some of the key ideas in an easily remembered and suggestive form. I will present and discuss it in the concluding part of this material.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
W.G. Vincenti, What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).
R. Laudan (ed.), The Nature of Technological Knowledge. Are Models of Scientific Change Relevant? (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1984).
This thought comes from Robert McGinn.
E.W. Constant, The Origins of the Turbojet Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), p. 10. Constant’s concept of normal technology is analogous to (and derivative from) Kuhn’s well-known concept of normal science;
T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
M. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 328.
H.A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 2nd. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), pp. 132–133.
H.G.J. Aitken, Syntony and Spark — The Origins of Radio (New York: Wiley Interscience, 1976), p. 314.
O. Mayr, ‘The Science—Technology Relationship as a Historiographic Problem’, Technology and Culture 17(October, 1976), pp. 663–673, quotation from p. 677.
Fuller discussion of a truncated version of this diagram appears in the book.
G. Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949), pp. 27–32.
E.T. Layton, Review of O. Mayr, (ed.), Philosophers and Machines, Technology and Culture 18 (January, 1977), pp. 89–91, quotation from p. 89.
T.J. Pinch and W.E. Bijker, ‘The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts: Or How the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other’, in W.E. Bijker, T.P. Hughes, and T.J. Pinch (eds.), The Social Construction of Technological Systems (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), pp. 17–50.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1992 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Vincenti, W.G. (1992). Engineering Knowledge, Type of Design, and Level of Hierarchy: Further Thoughts About What Engineers Know…. In: Kroes, P., Bakker, M. (eds) Technological Development and Science in the Industrial Age. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 144. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8010-6_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8010-6_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-4186-9
Online ISBN: 978-94-015-8010-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive