The Nature of Engineering

This book is about engineering, and yet it is for everybody. It is for citizens of technological democracies who have had little or no formal instruction in engineering, but who sense that there exists something in or about engineering that they can use over time to participate more effectively in public decision making venues. It is also for engineers inasmuch as they have not proven to be better citizens of technological democracies than anyone else. Although this book will appeal to the casual reader who has read or would read Douglas Hofstadter’s “metaphorical fugue” Gödel, Escher, Bach, it is aimed at the serious reader who would use it to argue for the inclusion of engineering in the general education of college freshmen and who would teach a course, say “engineering for everybody,” using this book as the primary textbook. Its main question: What is engineering? Engineering is said to be a learned discipline. So it is said to consist first in a community of scholars sharing a unique worldview, and second in a reflection of that worldview into a body of learned works and university degree-granting programs. It is likened to, distinguished from, and connected with other learned disciplines, and its first principles or essences are discovered: some deriving from science, mathematics and ethics; others being unique to engineering. All learned works⎯whether compositions or performances⎯are said to be the works of scholars specially empowered to invoke the so-called “higher” functions of the mind that underlie the unique essences of their disciplines. This is a scholar’s forte. Accordingly, the engineer’s forte is discovered beneath the unique essences of engineering. Less time is spent in this book telling who the engineers are, what they do on their jobs, how their profession is organized and what it does, how the Egyptian pyramids were made and how nuclear power plants make energy, than is told in Samuel Florman’s The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (1976), Henry Petroski’s To Engineer Is Human (1985), David Billington’s The Innovators (1996), and Michael Davis’ Thinking Like an Engineer (1998); but it seeks to build upon and thus in some ways tell more about engineering than is told in Walter Vincenti’s What Engineers Know And How They Know It (1990) and in Billy Vaughn Koen’s Discussion of the Method (2003). Philosophers would call this book “the metaphysics of engineering” inasmuch as it lays down a definition for engineering and discovers its essences. The nature of engineering, then, consists in its natures, specifically, its definition and its essences. To wit, this book belongs with Lucretius’ The Nature of the Universe and Kant’s Metaphysics of Mo­ rals. Its quest for the essences of engineering traverses the collective mind of the academic community; but these essences are dispersed among the various states of that mind, namely, its conscious, twilight, and unconscious states. So this book is structured as the journey told by Dante in The Devine Comedy with the reader in the role Dante made in his book for himself, and with this book’s author in the role Dante made for Virgil, Dante’s mentor and guide. Our journey begins in the conscious state in response to a call. The call for this book rang out in 1945. The end of World War II left the USA with world pre-eminences in military power and economic potential⎯a good combination for