Do engineers have a problem, or philosophers?

For some people philosophy and engineering may sound like a strange combination. Philosophers are often seen as thinking long and hard about abstract problems, while engineers are seen as hands-on people that meanwhile look for practical solutions to the world’s small and large problems. One may then wonder what added value philosophers have for engineering practice. Today, at the CEPHAD 2010 conference (”The Borderland between Philosophy and Design Research”) Pieter Vermaas, a philosopher of technology, choose to step back and reflect on the practical relevance of his own work.

In the past years Pieter Vermaas, Wybo Houkes and some of their colleagues have published a series of well-received articles on different matters pertaining to the dual nature of technical artifacts and more in particular the meaning of the concept artifact function. They have counted 18 official accounts of artifact function in publications by engineers from different domains. Obviously this is a conceptual mess, with artifact function having an ambiguous meaning, something philosophers do not like.

But although the Houkes-Vermaas account of an artifact function has been well-received by their fellow philosophers, they have noted that engineers tend to be somewhat indifferent to their achievement of coming up with the right account of artifact function. How does this improve engineering, they asked Vermaas. He assumed that engineers must have communication problems and philosophers should help to solve them. It got him thinking and today he raised the question whether it is perhaps philosophers have a problem in the way in which they do their work and not engineers.

Engineers themselves apparently do not perceive a serious or urgent problem in their using different or sometimes ambiguous concept of function. Why not? Vermaas here referred to the work of Bucciarelli and others, indicating that designing actually prospers by using concepts that have a flexible meaning. Perhaps all that is left to do for philosophers, then, is solving the communication problem by assisting in the translation between different ways of perceiving and describing artifact functions, instead of (normatively) prescribing the right account of artifact function. Or so Vermaas suggested. But he was clearly posing all this as a question for further reflection.

Both the presentation and the lively discussion following it have been filmed and will - so I have understood from the conference organizers - soon be available at CEPHAD’s conference website. This holds as well for other very interesting parts of the conference, such as a talk by 3TU.Ethics fellow Peter-Paul Verbeek on “design ethics and the moral significance of things”.