Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Sciences

Dov M. Gabbay · Paul Thagard · John Woods · Anthonie W.M. Meijers

Nov 2009 · Elsevier

About this ebook

The Handbook Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Sciences addresses numerous issues in the emerging field of the philosophy of those sciences that are involved in the technological process of designing, developing and making of new technical artifacts and systems. These issues include the nature of design, of technological knowledge, and of technical artifacts, as well as the toolbox of engineers. Most of these have thus far not been analyzed in general philosophy of science, which has traditionally but inadequately regarded technology as mere applied science and focused on physics, biology, mathematics and the social sciences.

• First comprehensive philosophical handbook on technology and the engineering sciences
• Unparalleled in scope including explorative articles
• In depth discussion of technical artifacts and their ontology
• Provides extensive analysis of the nature of engineering design
• Focuses in detail on the role of models in technology

Ratings and reviews

This is a handbook for the student of technology. It summarizes knowledge and practice, lists questions, and sets a research agenda. The contents are hierarchically organized. Philosophy is the study of aims, methods and assumptions. While that of science was about representing reality, it is applied here to five disciplines: architecture, agriculture, medicine, biology, and information. The original literature search resulted in sixty-five topics which were then constrained by available experts and authors. This led to 41 chapters in 6 parts for the definitions and theories, epistemology and ontology, design, modeling and methodology, norms and values, and issues. Each chapter has introduction, discussion analogous to the overall parts, and conclusion. For example, computer science is described as modeling and designing artifacts. It looks at the nature of information. Computational philosophy superseded linguistics in the 90s and cognitive artifacts now combine hybrid human and computer components. This book itself might be a candidate for ontology extraction by the semantic web. Another example would be synthetic biology where Craig Venter’s views on digitization and the writing of the genetic code are discussed.

About the author

Dov M. Gabbay is Augustus De Morgan Professor Emeritus of Logic at the Group of Logic, Language and Computation, Department of Computer Science, King's College London. He has authored over four hundred and fifty research papers and over thirty research monographs. He is editor of several international Journals, and many reference works and Handbooks of Logic.