Engineering and Science

In the perception of many, modern engineering is seen as taking over its knowledge from scientists and, by some occasionally dramatic probably intellectually uninteresting process, using this knowledge to fashion material artifacts. From this standpoint of view, studying the epistemology of science should automatically subsume the knowledge content of engineering. In view of several historians, technology and engineering appear not as derivatives from science, but autonomous bodies of knowledge, identifiably different from the scientific knowledge with which they interact. Engineering has its own significant component of thought, though different in its specifics, resembles scientific thought in being creative and constructive; it is not simply routine and deductive as assumed in the applied-science model. In this view, engineering, though it may apply science, is not the same as or entirely applied science. Design, one of the core activities of engineering, involves tentative layout of the arrangement and dimensions of the artifice, checking of the candidate device by mathematical analysis or experimental test to see if it does not. Such procedure usually requires several iterations before finally dimensioned plans can be released for production. Numerous difficult tradeoffs may be required, calling for decisions on the basis of incomplete or uncertain knowledge. W. G. Vincenti identified six categories of engineering knowledge, as given in previous post, after exploring several historical cases of engineering activities.