Philosophy of Scicence for Engineering Sciences

William Wulf, President of the National Academy of Engineering, recently called for a radical revision of engineering education. I doubt this effort will succeed-until there is a radical revision of our understanding of the place of the engineer and the engineering enterprise in the universe. The Scientific Cosmology has always had a problem making sense of engineering as real and meaningful. By contrasting the scientific and engineering traditions in a number of ways, I begin to construct an Engineering Cosmology that is formally complementary to the Scientific Cosmology. A rigorous examination of scientific idealizations-such as perfect repeatabilityreveals aspects of the limits and incompleteness of the scientific model. An understanding of Popper's Question, together with an examination of the classical idealizations of motion (viz. frictionless; three-body indeterminacy), point to a fundamentally thermodynamic Engineering Cosmology. Popper's demarcation entails that the symmetric Scientific Cosmology is incommensurable with this thermodynamic Engineering Cosmology. Additional methodological and historical arguments strongly support the thesis that Scientific and Engineering Cosmologies are formally complementary. These conclusions demand a radical revision of engineering education and a fundamentally new conceptual framework for management of engineering and technology for reshaping the world.

Many philosophical accounts of scientific models fail to distinguish between a simulation model and other forms of models. This failure is unfortunate because there are important differences pertaining to their methodology and epistemology that favor their philosophical understanding. The core claim presented here is that simulation models are rich and complex units of analysis in their own right, that they depart from known forms of scientific models in significant ways, and that a proper understanding of the type of model simulations are fundamental for their philosophical assessment. I argue that simulation models can be distinguished from other forms of models by the many algorithmic structures, representation relations, and new semantic connections involved in their architecture. In this article, I reconstruct a general architecture for a simulation model, one that faithfully captures the complexities involved in most scientific research with computer simulations. Furthermore , I submit that a new methodology capable of conforming such architecture into a fully functional, computationally tractable computer simulation must be in place. I discuss this methodology-what I call recasting-and argue for its philosophical novelty. If these efforts are heading towards the right interpretation of simulation models, then one can show that computer simulations shed new light on the philosophy of science. To illustrate the potential of my interpretation of simulation models , I briefly discuss simulation-based explanations as a novel approach to questions about scientific explanation.

This is the first text on Philosophy of Engineering in Brazil. It introduces the subject with the bias of convincing readers that such a theme is relevant to their interests, while acknowledging that it is comparatively novel. It argues that engineering is not applied science, the prevalent view, and offers instead the understanding that engineering is better defined by its method. Production Engineering, a Brazilian specialty of engineering, is then addressed from the perspective of Philosophy of Engineering, and some consequences discussed. As a result of the preceding, this dissertation presents the results of original research on the epistemology of knowledge in engineering and concludes by presenting suggestions towards a research agenda.

Michael Polanyi insisted that scientific knowledge was intensely personal in nature, though held with universal intent and hence shared. His insights regarding the personal values of beauty and morality in science are first enunciated and then explored for their relevance to engineering. It is shown that the practice of engineering is also governed by aesthetics and ethics. For example, Polanyi’s three spheres of morality in science—those of the individual scientist, the scientific community and the wider society—have parallels in engineering—namely the individual engineer, the professional institution and the public. In addition, the need for ‘faith’ and ‘trust’ in the practice of science and engineering respectively is stressed. The fact that values in engineering are shared is also demonstrated—in aesthetics through an example that shows convergence of practitioner opinion to solutions reflecting established models of aesthetics; and in ethics through the recognition that many pr...

In this paper, it is studied the dynamics of the robotic bird in terms of time response and robustness. It is analyzed the wing angle of attack and the velocity of the bird, the tail influence, the gliding flight and the flapping flight. The results are positive for the construction of flying robots. The development of computational simulation based on the dynamic of the robotic bird should allow testing strategies and different algorithms of control such as integer and fractional controllers.