1

WHAT IS ENGINEERING?
Carl Mitcham

Any regionalized philosophy must make some effort to identify what it wants to think about, its
subject matter. “What is science?” is a key question for philosophy of science. “What is religion?”
is a key issue in philosophy of religion. Such questions are sometimes called demarcation problems.
Philosophy of engineering, likewise, must at some point seek to identify engineering and mark it
off from near neighbors, that is, other dimensions of experience from which it can be distinguished.
This is not as easy as may initially appear, because engineering today is a contested concept—
indeed, a contested activity. “Engineering” is not a rigid designator. There is no simple answer to
what is truly not a simple question. Speaking generally, different answers tend to be given by engi-
neers and by non-engineers. (In like manner, scientists do not always agree with the definitions of
science given by non-scientists, nor do those who describe themselves as religious always like iden-
tities constructed by others.) Additionally, engineers and non-engineers do not always fully agree
among themselves. In the present case, the question concerning engineering will be explored by
considering a selective spectrum of responses along with their strengths and weaknesses.

1.1. Engineering Accounts

One engineering response to the question is represented by the British Royal Academy of Engineering
web site: “Engineering covers many different types of activity. Engineers make things, they make things
work and they make things work better” (www.raeng.org.uk/publications/reports/engineering-and-
economic-growth-a-global-view). Interestingly, few national engineering academies—not even the
International Council of Academies of Engineering and Technological Sciences—provide a definition
of engineering. However, expanding on the Royal Academy description, a scholarly apologia for engi-
neering authored by two engineers and a sociologist argues at length that engineering is the making of
“ingenious devices” and is coeval with the origin of the human species.

In its earliest form, engineering involved the making of stone tools and other artifacts to
aid in human survival [see also Chapter 2, “A Brief History of Engineering” by Jennifer
Karns Alexander, this volume]. During the ensuing millennia, the manufacture of inge-
nious devices expanded and contributed to the shaping of civilizations, to the establishment
of human institutions, and to the enhancement of standards of living. Now, in the 21st
century, engineering may be viewed as a profession which involves creative thought and
skilled actions related to conceptualizing, planning, designing, developing, making, testing,

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implementing, using, improving, and disposing of a variety of devices, invariably seeking to

meet a perceived societal interest.
(Harms et al. 2004: v)

Nuclear engineer and philosopher Billy V. Koen goes even further in an extended, detailed, system-
atic argument regarding the essential human activity. According to Koen, engineering is defined by
its method, which is “the use of heuristics to cause the best change in a poorly understood situation
within the available resources” (Koen 2003: 59). Expanding, “a heuristic is anything that provides a
plausible aid or direction in the solution of a problem but is in the final analysis unjustified, incapable
of justification, and potentially fallible” (Koen 2003: 28). In effect, every decision that humans make
to change things is engineering. “To be human is to be an engineer” (Koen 2003: 7, 58, italics in the
original both times).
One strength of this view is that it presents engineering as crucial to being human and thereby
justifies the importance of engineers. It is the basis of a strong philosophy for engineers, helping them
explain and justify themselves to non-engineers (who, on Koen’s account, are actually engineers
without realizing it). A weakness is virtually the same: it turns so much into engineering that there
doesn’t seem to be anything left out. It fails, for instance, to distinguish between the editing of a
poem (deleting or replacing words for better ones) and the engineering of a roadway. Even if all
engineering is heuristics, does that mean all heuristics is engineering? Additionally, it fails to account
for the very specific curriculum that engineering schools teach to engineers. A strong philosophy for
engineering is not necessarily the same as a well-developed philosophy of engineering.

1.2. The Word “Engineering”

As has often been noted, the term “engineering” is of a distinctly modern provenance that challenges
an expansive definition. In the Harms, Baetz, and Volti quotation in the previous section, “engineer-
ing” is derived from the Latin ingeniosus. From the earliest times, some humans have been described
as ingenious—but not all humans. In fact, it was a rare person who was termed ingenious. Vitruvius’s
De architectura (1st century BCE) distinguishes the ingenious (hand-working) artisan (Greek tekton)
from the architekton or architect, who supervised building. In Shakespeare’s Troiles and Cressida (Act
II, Scene 3), it is the great warrior Achilles who is referred to as a “rare enginer.”
The first group of people to whom the word “engineer” was consistently applied were designers
and operators of “engines of war.” Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), for instance, was often referred
to differentially as engineer, architect, or painter in order to emphasize, respectively, his military,
civilian, or aesthetic activities. Later in the Leonardo century, Tommaso Garzoni (1549–1589), in
an eccentric compendia of professions, further differentiated the engineer from the mechanic: the
former working primarily with the mind, the latter more with hands.
Although etymology cannot resolve the philosophical issue of what engineering is, it does indi-
cate that the concept emerged at a particular time, suggesting that the activity to which it refers was
something historically new. The newness of the word and, by implication, activity is further endorsed
in the founding of the British Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), the oldest professional engineer-
ing society. When in 1828 the ICE applied for a Royal Charter, King George IV requested an iden-
tification of that to which this new institution was to be dedicated; he needed a legal solution to the
demarcation problem. He was given, and used in the charter, what has become a classic definition:
Civil (meaning all non-military) engineering is “the art of directing the great sources of power in
nature for the use and convenience of man” (or, we would now say, “humans”).
Three observations can be made about this definition: First, the qualifier “civil” was necessary
because, as already noted, at that time engineering was a military profession in the Corps of Royal
Engineers. Engineering was undergoing a shift from military to civilian affairs precisely during that

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historical period in which civil society as a whole was both expanding and being transformed by
the rise of the bourgeois class and capitalist political economy. Engineering participated in and
contributed to that transformation. Second, the “great sources of power in nature” were assumed
best revealed by the new natural philosophy that conceived the physical world in mechanistic terms.
Third, the aim of “use and convenience” echoes a theory of morals associated with the thought of
John Locke (1632–1704) and David Hume (1711–1776). More consideration of the second and third
points can help further reflection on the demarcation question.
There are a number of strengths and weaknesses of this classic ICE definition. It has certainly
functioned well in promoting a legitimating professional self-understanding of English-speaking
engineering. However, because it makes engineering virtually synonymous with human benefit, it
has also served to short-circuit critical reflection.

1.3. Engineering, Applied Science, and Technology

Engineering has often been described as involving modern natural science—a view that is implicit in
the ICE definition. Indeed, an ICE-commissioned concept paper by Thomas Tredgold from which
the classic definition is drawn makes this explicit by describing engineering as “that practical applica-
tion of the most important principles of natural philosophy which has in a considerable degree realized the
anticipations of [Francis] Bacon, and changed the aspect and state of affairs in the whole world” (italics
added). (The complete text, from the minutes of an 1828 ICE meeting, is available in Mitcham 2020:
368–369.) Bacon (1561–1626) had argued for creation of a new approach to knowledge production
that stressed its practical utility. “Human knowledge and human power meet in one [but nature] to
be commanded must be obeyed” (Novum organum I, 3). Tredgold’s paper built on this view and main-
tained that it was through the new mathematicized science of hydraulics that the Dutch had separated
engineering from hydraulic architecture. Similar claims regarding mathematicization are often made
for conceiving of modern technology as (at least in part) applied science, that is, putting science to
work. In considering what engineering is, then, it is appropriate to dig deeper into the extensive dis-
cussion of possible relationships between science, engineering, and technology.
Consider the polysemic term “technology.” In an extensive historical examination of this “odd
concept,” Eric Schatzberg (2018) notes a plethora of closely related terms—“mechanical arts,”
“applied arts,” “useful arts,” “industrial arts,” “industrial techniques”—with different usages among,
for example, social scientists, engineers, and humanists. For historians, anthropologists, and other
social scientists, “technology” tends to be co-extensive with material culture. Like historian Lewis
Mumford’s preferred term “technics” (Mumford 1934), it covers not just tools and machines but
everything from clothing, shelter, utensils, utilities, and decorative objects of craft and art to mega-
artifacts such as monuments, transport infrastructures, and communication networks—in short, all
physical things made by humans. As social scientists have long argued, there are a host of underap-
preciated interactions (mediations) both ancient and modern between social orders and technologies.
Carl Mitcham (1994) has likewise argued for a typology that recognizes technology not just as
objects but also as distinctive forms of knowledge, activity, and even volition. In their conceptual-
ization of technology as craft object, for instance, anthropologists often describe artisanship knowl-
edge as manual skill. In the words of French physical anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan (1993:
254–255), “in preindustrial societies the individual level of technicity was relatively high [because
of lives] filled with manual activities of many kinds,” whereas contemporary technicity has been
“demanualized.” British cultural anthropologist Tim Ingold, taking Mitcham’s typology as a starting
point (Ingold 2000: 295ff.), provides further phenomenological descriptions of craft making (Ingold
2013) as the background against which engineering comes into relief as a unique form of technology
as knowledge, activity, and even intention. Simplifying, hand-craft artisans are less explicitly moti-
vated than engineers to transform; instead they seek to live in expressive harmony with the world.

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Yanagi Sōetsu’s classic account of The Unknown Craftsman (1972) richly describes how mingei, or the
“hand-crafted art of ordinary people,” is based in aesthetic appreciation of the material qualities of
utilitarian objects such as bowls and cups.
For engineers, however, “technology” can paradoxically serve both as an umbrella term including all
forms of engineering and to name something less scientifically based but still related. An “institute of
technology” (such as MIT) teaches multiple types of engineering; yet engineers simultaneously contrast
their more intellectual work to the manual skills of technologists or technicians who install, operate, and
maintain what has been engineered. A bachelor of engineering degree requires greater knowledge of
science than an associate degree in engineering technology; the former is more likely to be awarded by
a university, the latter by what in the U.S. is called a “community college.” (Mixing things up, American
technicians are in Great Britain often called “engineers”; in Germany and Austria, Techniker can some-
times be translated as “engineer”; and even in the United States, the operators of railroad locomotives
and other large mechanical devices such as heating plants can be called “engineers.”)
According to a widely quoted statement attributed to the pioneering aeronautical engineer Theo-
dore von Kármán (1881–1963), “The scientist describes what is; the engineer creates what never
was” (Allibone 1980: 110). For von Kármán, engineering creation nevertheless utilizes scientific
knowledge. In his words,

In thermodynamics, . . . theoretical discoveries preceded by many years the actual produc-
tion of engines and similar hardware. Similarly, the development of the theory of electro-
magnetism occurred long before some engineers saw how to apply it to create the electrical
industry. And, of course, atomic theory preceded practical applications by several decades.
In aerodynamics, . . . the discovery of the fundamental laws of lift [gave] us the first real
understanding of what makes flight possible, and . . . set the stage for the amazingly swift
progress to follow.
(von Kármán 1967: 59)

Despite its specialized accuracy, von Kármán overlooks how thermodynamics also arose through
work by the French military engineer Sadi Carnot (1796–1832) to improve the efficiency of the
steam engine, well before it was used in designing the internal combustion engine.
In a more detailed conceptualizing of the science-engineering relationship, philosopher Mario
Bunge (1967) argues that engineering can complement if not replace some practices of “prescientific
arts and crafts” with what he calls “grounded rules.” Scientific laws describe relationships and patterns
in what is; rules (both social and technological) prescribe how to use these laws to create what is not
yet. Trial and error or empirical craft rules of thumb become grounded when they can be accounted
by scientific laws. Scientific accounting takes place through the formulation of “technological theo-
ries” (as found in the “technological” or “engineering sciences”).
Technological or engineering theories are of two types: substantive and operative. Substantive
theories deploy scientific laws in the engineering analysis of concrete situations, the way models from
the physics of fluid dynamics assist in the aerodynamic engineering of airfoils. Operative theories arise
when scientific methods are used to examine the workings of technologies or human-technology
interactions. Thermodynamics, as noted, arose from systematic or scientific examination of steam
engines; industrial engineering focuses on how to improve human-technological interactions in pro-
duction or utilization processes.
Although often criticized, Bunge’s “scientific philosophy” of technology remains one of the earli-
est to recognize the distinctiveness of engineering. Additionally, his description of how engineering
produces a special type of knowledge accords well, for instance, with engineer Walter Vincenti’s
account of the growth of knowledge about airfoil design (see also Chapter 8, “Prescriptive Engineer-
ing Knowledge,” Sjoerd Zwart, this volume). Initially, aeronautical engineers

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chose their airfoils from catalogs . . . of profiles devised by research engineers or designers
to achieve various categories of performance. Most of these profiles were developed by
modifying previously successful forms, using rules learned from experience, such theoreti-
cal understanding and methods as were available, and a vast amount of wind-tunnel testing.
The mix of methods changed with time, with fluid-dynamic theory slowly replacing rules
of experience.
(Vincenti 1990: 34)

Nathan Rosenberg and Edward Steinmueller (2013) make a similar case for knowledge production
in chemical as well as aeronautical engineering.
By contrast, historians of technology such as Edwin Layton Jr. (1971b), Edward Constant II
(1980), and Eugene Ferguson (1992) have argued against any easy description of engineering as
applied science. Layton’s catchy formulation is that the two forms of knowledge are “mirror-image
twins.” Making use of ideas from Thomas Kuhn (1962), Constant develops a model of technologi-
cal change from normal through “presumptive anomaly” (“when assumptions derived from science
indicate either that under some future conditions the conventional system will fail . . . or that a radi-
cally different system will do a better job”) to technological revolutions distinct from scientific ones
(Constant 1980: 15). Ferguson calls attention to Renaissance books called “theaters of machines”
filled with graphic illustrations for a welter of technological mechanisms on which engineers can
draw when designing complex useful machines. Other books provided graphical narrations of com-
plex engineering projects, enabling them to be imitated or transferred from one place to another, as
in Agricola’s De re metalica (1556). Such instruments of communication were later supplemented with
graphical means for analysis encoded in the standards of engineering drawing and physical tools of
analysis (such as the slide rule) as well as in visual algebra and geometric calculus. All such technolo-
gies exist alongside rather than as direct applications of science.
Despite its limitations, the concept of engineering as applied science remains attractive insofar as
engineering is identified with engineering sciences such as mechanics, thermodynamics, electron-
ics, aerodynamics, and materials science. However, as even von Kármán recognizes, engineering is
more than engineering science: it involves creation or what engineers regularly call design (see also
Chapter 21, “Engineering Design,” Peter Kroes, this volume).

1.4. Engineering as Designing

“Design” is another polysemic word. In the contemporary world, designers are all over the place.
There are fashion designers, graphic designers, interior designers, landscape designers, industrial
designers, and web designers. In both architecture and engineering design is referenced as a central,
even defining, feature. As another approach to the question concerning engineering, is it possible to
distinguish different types of design?
Historically, engineering arose as an activity distinguished from skilled artisanship and architec-
ture. Arnold Pacey (1990) wants to place subsistence agriculture even earlier in this path. The career
of Thomas Telford (1757–1834), the founding president of ICE, nicely illustrates a trajectory across
and thus suggests distinctions among these four human engagements with the world.
Telford was born into a subsistence farming family on the English-Scottish border and began his
own career as a stone mason working under the direction of architects to construct civic structures
(houses and buildings) in the New Town of Edinburgh, Scotland (1770s and after). Having worked as
an artisan for a few years while simultaneously educating himself—as he records in his “Architectural
Commonplace Book,” by copying and commenting on texts from Colen Campbell’s Vitruvius Britan-
nicus (3 volumes, 1715–1725), Bernard de Montfaucon’s Antiquity Explained and Represented in Dia-
grams (15 volumes, 1721–1725), along with many others—he began to design and construct homes

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and other urban structures, and so called himself an architect. Then a decade later, as he turned from
civic structures to designing and constructing the canal transport infrastructure of England for com-
mercial utility, he assumed the title of “engineer.”
As the ICE charter had elaborated, “use and convenience” is synonymous with enhancing

the means of production and of traffic in states both for external and internal trade, as
applied in the construction of roads, bridges, aqueducts, canals, river navigation and docks,
for internal intercourse and exchange, and in the construction of ports, harbors, moles,
breakwaters and lighthouses, and in the art of navigation by artificial power for the purposes
of commerce, and in the construction and adaptation of machinery, and in the drainage of
cities and towns.

This type of commercially useful design work to facilitate transport via roads and canals may be
contrasted with that of architecture, which aims to humanize a particular place. Architecture is
more concerned with ordering space to accommodate repetitive movement in a sedentary life than
with movement across great distances for power or commercial gain. From its historical beginnings,
engineering in England emerged as a handmaid of those economic institutions promoted by Adam
Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) that became known as capitalism.
In one of the original expositions of a Western (Greek and Roman) architectural tradition, Vit-
ruvius identified three criteria for good building: firmatas (durability), utilitas (utility), and venustas
(beauty) (De architectura I, 3, 2). Although engineering “use and convenience” echoes utilitas, and
engineering to some degree aims for durability (although capitalist creative destruction has been
known to require engineers to design-in obsolescence), what stands out is the fact that engineering
design qua engineering does not aim for beauty—especially beauty as classically understood, which
cultivates delight and the raising of spirits among those who inhabit its carpentered spaces (see also
Chapter 9, “Engineering as Art and the Art of Engineering,” Lara Schrijver, this volume). As one
philosopher of technology puts it, “For the architect, function and aesthetics take center stage [while
for] engineers, the design of an artifact . . . is approached with questions of utility and efficiency” (Pitt
2011: 133). In another’s succinct phrasing, “What engineers tend to emphasize in place of beauty is
cost, safety, and efficiency” (Davis 2010: 21).
For engineering “use and convenience” functions, however unconsciously, as another distinguish-
ing technical term based in the proto-utilitarian moral theory of Locke and Hume and thereby biased
toward cost and efficiency. Locke’s labor theory of value can be read as domesticating Bacon’s tech-
noscientific aspiration to “conquer nature” for “the relief of man’s estate.” As further developed by
Hume’s this-worldly philosophy of possessive individualism, the foundation of moral judgment is
explicitly denominated as “utility.” Whereas premodern philosophers such as Aristotle had understood
the virtues as practices that realize or perfect innate human potentials, Hume “ascribe[s] to their utility
the praise, which we bestow on the . . . virtues.” And with human artifacts, all goodness is said to rest
on their “use and conveniency” (Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Section II, Part II).
Over the course of the 20th century, this ideal-type distinction between architectural and engi-
neering design in terms of end or goal orientation has been complicated by the emergence of a bewil-
dering diversity of design professions and the development of design studies focused as well on subject
matters and methods (see, e.g., Cross 1986). As Richard Buchanan, a leading contributor to this
interdisciplinary field, observes, “Design studies—the history, criticism, and theory of design, as well
as design research through empirical investigation and philosophical speculation—[has exerted ever]
greater influence on the study of design methods and methodology” (Buchanan 2009: 414). Insofar as
these studies generalize a conception of design as grounded in processes of composition or synthesis
(in contrast to division or analysis) and have sought to identify methods common to architecture,
engineering, and other design fields, they weaken any appeal to designing as engineering-specific.

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At the same time, as Buchanan also notes, design studies commonly recognize two broad tradi-
tions: arts and crafts versus engineering. The craft method, as already mentioned, is based on intuitive
judgments combined with “traditional practices of trial and error in the making of artifacts and the
gradual evolution of product forms adapted to particular circumstances.” Engineering methods focus
“on drawing and draftsmanship [in which] the designer sketches possible product forms that satisfy
the needs of manufacturers and the marketplace and then develops detailed scale drawings that can
be used as instructions or specifications to guide manufacture and construction” (Buchanan 2009:
414–415). Although drawing occurs in the arts in the form of preliminary sketching, engineering
graphics becomes a method for representing information from “the natural sciences and mathematics
[that facilitates] calculation and forethought about materials, energy, and how the parts of a product
may be fabricated, combined, and assembled to bear loads, distribute stress and heat, and so forth”
(Buchanan 2009: 413).
Although designing is probably the most common response to a question about the essence of
engineering, what again undermines it as an unambiguous circumscription is that such calculative
designing has migrated from material construction into the fields of economic analysis, social orga-
nization and bureaucratic processes, services delivery, commercial and political communication via
symbolic environments, and deliberative decision-making in general. Multiple activities have been
colonized by engineering or adopted methods from engineering. Further challenges for taking engi-
neering design as its defining feature include the fact that engineers perform many more activities
than designing, disagreements over its history about the proper role of design in engineering educa-
tion (Grayson 1993), debates about design methods, methodology, and the computer transformation
of engineering design (see, e.g., Kroes 2009), and arguments for engineering methods as analogous
to the dynamic process of biological evolution occurs (see Wimsatt 2007).

1.5. Engineering as Profession

Still another response to the question concerning engineering considers its character as a profession
(see also Chapter 43, “Professional Codes of Ethics,” by Michael Davis, this volume). This approach
prompts further ethical interrogation of the original ICE description.
According to Michael Davis, there are four increasingly specific concepts of a profession: as voca-
tion or work, as occupation by which one earns a living, as honest or respected occupation, and as
specific type of honest occupation. In philosophical dialogue with diverse practicing professionals,
he has developed a concept of the necessary and sufficient conditions for a profession in the fourth
sense: “A profession is a number of individuals in the same occupation voluntarily organized to earn a
living by openly serving a certain moral ideal in a morally-permissible way beyond what law, market,
and [public opinion] would otherwise require” (Davis 1997: 417, 2014: 490). Professions can thus be
distinguished in regard to “underlying occupation,” “moral ideal,” or the ways by which “they seek
to achieve [an] ideal” (Davis 1997: 420).
Adopting this framework, the ICE definition can be restated as

The engineering profession is a voluntary organization of people (e.g., the ICE) who earn
their living through the art of directing the great sources of power in nature (occupation)
for the use and convenience of humans (moral ideal) in a morally-permissible way beyond
what law, market, and public opinion would otherwise require.

“Art” here can be expanded as “the methods of engineering design” with the “sources of power in
nature” coming into play through applied science. Such an expansion would revive the contentious
issue of the science-engineering relationship. Moreover, Davis is skeptical about relying on some art
of engineering as a distinguishing feature. In his view, engineering cannot really be grasped by means

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of some specific function such as design, since “engineers do a great many things: design, discover,
inspect, invent, manage, teach, test, testify, and so on.” Engineers are instead best identified by a com-
mon education and “a shared way of doing certain things” the precise contours of which are “not
a matter of abstract definition, logic, or the like, but of history” (Davis 2009: 336, 337). This places
education, moral ideal, and shared way of doing things at the center of the what-is-engineering
question.
The alleged commonality of educational experience presents something of a challenge, since what
is included in any engineering curriculum can reflect how the engineer is to be employed and the
cultural context. Engineering education in the military includes a history of warfare. Historically, the
engineering curriculum at the École Polytechnique has been substantially more mathematical than
in British polytechnics. American corporations that hire engineers now want engineers to be taught
economics and entrepreneurship.
Prescinding from education and the vague “way of doing things,” the moral ideal of use and
convenience and its history is central to understanding the engineering profession. As suggested,
the original English-speaking engineer interpretation presumed that use and convenience was
best pursued by capitalism. This effectively transferred the military way of doing things, where
obedience to authority played a prominent role, into the civilian sector, as loyalty to a corpo-
rate employer or (in cases where engineers incorporated their own consulting firms) engineer-
ing clients. This had the effect of making engineers accessories for many of the negative social
effects of the Industrial Revolution to which they made prominent if often not fully appreciated
contributions.
In the United Kingdom, the problems engendered by capitalist engineering were addressed pri-
marily by political reform through the emergence of a strong labor movement and ideals of socialism.
One contributor to this development was Robert Owen (1771–1858), a self-made industrialist and
proto-engineer. Disturbed by the way workers were treated in his own textile mills, Owen set out to
create socialist alternative cooperatives in which use and convenience was oriented more directly to
worker welfare. His engineering-like design of utopian socialist communities in both England and
America failed to be successful as practical endeavors (in part because of corporate power opposition)
but nevertheless helped inspire important political reforms especially in the UK.
In the United States, by contrast, the moral ideal of engineering became subject to extended
internal debate, as analyzed by Edwin Layton’s now classic The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Respon-
sibility and the American Engineering Profession (1971a). There Layton highlighted the tension between
the moral ideals of the engineer as both applied scientists and business persons. In his words, “Engi-
neering is a scientific profession, yet the test of the engineer’s work lies not in the laboratory, but in
the marketplace” (Layton 1971a: 1).
In this social context, a number of historical tensions developed. One was reflected in the thought
of social scientist Thorstein Veblen. His Engineers and the Price System (1921) contrasted the engineer-
ing notion of technical efficiency as a moral ideal with the capitalist ideal of economic or market
efficiency as, in effect, alternative interpretations of use and convenience. Indeed, there has been
within the engineering profession a persistent attraction to a moral-political ideal of technocracy in
which engineers and engineering expertise would play a prominent role in the state. For example,
in late-20th- and early-21st-century China, engineers came to play leading roles in government (see
Kirby 2000; Liu 2016).
In an ostensibly democratic social context, however, a technocratic moral ideal was at a philo-
sophical disadvantage. Instead, over the course of the 20th century in the American engineering
community, the explicit articulation of moral ideals socially evolved from explicit commitments to
company loyalty to holding paramount obligations to protect public safety, health, and welfare, even
though this ideal is not as integral to the profession as, for example, the ideal of health is to medicine
(Mitcham 2020, ch. 9; for some comparison with other countries, see ch. 12).

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1.6. Engineering as Modernity

Looking back on and extending his own earlier analysis, Layton too has noticed a persistent Ameri-
can engineering uneasiness with use and convenience.

Some of the worst horrors of the Industrial Revolution, after all, took place in factories,
mines, and mills that were useful and convenient in some sense. Trusts and monopolies
similarly might be considered useful and convenient for some, but most Americans regarded
them as evil. Beginning in the late 19th century, American engineers were increasingly
beset with a feeling of guilt and anxiety about the negative social effects of technology—for
whose accomplishments, up to that time, they had been taking full credit. . . . American
engineers reacted . . . by insisting that its true end is the good of humanity. This involved
redefining the goals of engineering. Tredgold’s “use and convenience of man” no longer
seemed strong enough, and many engineers sought to raise the sights of engineering to a
stronger notion of social benefit and moral improvement.
(Layton 1989: 60–61)

The Revolt of the Engineers had examined the effort within the engineering community to construct
a professional self-understanding as obligated to protect public safety, health, and welfare in a way
that would give engineers sufficient autonomy to resist excessive control by distorting commercial
interests. Now almost two decades later, Layton wanted to examine the ways engineers have appealed
to the concept of engineering as applied science as an external ideological justification addressed to
society at large.
The engineering as applied science ideology had a twofold social function. On the one hand, this
“ideological portrait of engineering and engineers as agents of progress through science” raised the
social status of engineers. It appropriated for engineering the good name of science as the source of
modern progress. On the other, scientists did not object, and they readily adopted the same ideol-
ogy as a means to justify the value of science and persuade the public to fund scientific research. As
the linear model of Vannevar Bush (1945) had it, basic science creates a reservoir of knowledge from
which engineers and entrepreneurs can draw. In the course of critically analyzing the inadequacy of
this interpretation, Layton draws on other important studies in the history of technology that argue
for a more subtle interaction of scientific and engineering (or technological) knowledge and reviews
a history of alternative definitions of engineering as design or systems construction and management.
One alternative definition to which he gives extended consideration is the argument of Martin
Heidegger ([1954] 1977) for the essence of technology as a kind of truth or revealing, insofar as it
might reveal something about engineering. Because of his rejection of any strictly instrumental con-
ception of technology, Heidegger provides a “radical challenge to Tredgold’s definition” (Layton 1989:
64). Without fully endorsing Heidegger’s concept of modern technology as a “challenging” of nature,
Layton argues that there is considerable resonance with the historical reality created by engineering:

We are challenged by the long term, unexpected, and often undesirable effects of rapid
technological change in the modern era. The things that challenge us are the erosion of
cherished values and institutions, the reduction of humans to mere cogs in giant social
machines, environmental pollution, the psychological and moral dangers of modern mass
media, . . . and the excessive concentration of power and wealth in a few hands. We are
particularly challenged by threats to safety and even the continuation of the human species
implicit in modern weapons systems, or by unforeseen dangers to the environment and to
humans arising from technological activities.
(Layton 1989: 65)

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Moreover, the way Heidegger turns around the science-engineering relationship—describing science
as theoretical engineering instead of engineering as applied science—points toward the historical ways
in which “technology created the intellectual atmosphere out of which physics [as the archetypical
modern science] arose” (p. 66). Layton suggests that engineers archetypically function as those who
implement what Heidegger calls the Gestell or enframing of the world as Bestand or resource.
One strength of this radical description is that it places engineering squarely at the center of
modernity and thus rightly corrects more common beliefs that the modern world is defined by, for
example, science or democracy. It is instead defined by a kind of science founded in engineering
which is also the source of industrial technology. The world in which humans now live is an engi-
neered and continuously engineering world.
There are, however, two glaring weaknesses in this conception of engineering as the apotheosis of
modernity. First, at least in the version attributed to Heidegger, it highlights a dark side of techno-
scientific progress at the expense of appreciating its promise and brightness. Agreeing with the idea
that engineering is the defining feature of the modern historical period but deeply disagreeing with
an interpretation that stresses disruptive consequences, at the turn of the century the U.S. National
Academy of Engineering established a project to identify and publicize how 20 major engineering
achievements from electrification to high-performance materials have positively transformed the
20th century. In his foreword to a collaborative coffee table book promotion of this view, engi-
neer Neil Armstrong, the first human to walk on the Moon, summarized the thesis: A century of
engineering expansions, from civil and mechanical, through chemical and metallurgical, to electri-
cal, automotive, electronic, and aeronautical, “deepened with the development of new methods,
powerful computational tools, and dependable testing techniques,” has turned the “explanations and
understandings [of science] into new or improved machines, technologies, and processes—to bring
reality to ideas and to provide solutions to societal needs” without which “our world would be a very
different and less hospitable place” (Constable and Somerville 2003: vi, vii).
In a gloss on this grand achievements interpretation, the NAE President William Wulf stated an opti-
mistic belief that “2100 will be ‘more different’ from 2000 than 2000 was from 1900 [and] that the dif-
ferences will bring further improvements in our quality of life, and . . . be extended to many more of the
people of the planet” (Wulf 2000: 7). To assist this happening, Wulf promoted a second project, building
on the fact “that the Earth is already a humanly engineered artifact” (Wulf 2000: 9), to identify 14 “grand
challenges” for 21st-century engineering that have been endorsed by a number of engineering schools,
which also use them as recruiting tools (see engineeringchallenges.org). Reiterating aspirations to create
beneficial transformations in the human condition, on the occasion of its 50th anniversary, the NAE
issued another publication proclaiming how engineering was “making a world of difference” by “pro-
viding ever expanding services to people” (NAE 2014)—reaffirming the aim of use and convenience.
Second, as the contest between dark and bright interpretations of modernity indicates, moder-
nity itself is a contested concept at least as much as engineering. To define engineering as moder-
nity is thus to use one contested phenomenon to explain another. Modernity has been variously
understood in terms of cosmology (the decentered universe of Copernicus), theology (Protestant
Reformation), new political modes and orders (democracy), secularization (via the Enlightenment
criticisms of Western religion), economy (capitalist industrialization), and culture (individualism).
The conception of an emergent Anthropocene is another highly engineering-dependent version of
modernity with both dark and bright sides. Is any one of these useful or more useful than another in
pursuit of a philosophical understanding of engineering?

1.7. The Meaning of Engineering

To consider a possible connection between engineering and modernity deepens the original ques-
tion. “What is engineering?” can become a question not just about demarcation but also about

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meaning: not just “What is the definition of engineering?” but “What is the meaning of engineering?”
Beyond the isolating function of definitions, meaning considers relationships (ethical, political, onto-
logical, epistemological, aesthetic) with other aspects of reality. Ultimately, any attempt to circum-
scribe engineering necessarily enters into a dialectic between what is inside and what is outside; the
original question becomes coextensive with the philosophy of engineering as a whole.
What, then, is the meaning of engineering? One interpretation of this question would focus on
the meaning it might give to engineers themselves thus reiterating experience within the profes-
sion. Samuel Florman (1976), for instance, contends that the practice of engineering brings with
it existential pleasure in constructing the world. Another, more general version could ask about its
historico-philosophical meaning after the manner of G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831). What is the mean-
ing of engineering as a central if often overlooked feature of modernity? Is there some reason why
engineering as we experience it arose only once at a particular time and place in history and from
there has spread into the whole world?
Full engagement with such a Hegelian question is quite beyond the scope of the present chapter.
Hegel is rather marginalized in English-speaking analytic philosophy. Nevertheless, as a speculative
exercise, consider the following. Robert Pippin, a contemporary interpreter of Hegel, in a pro-
vocative reading of modernity, places the rise of subjectivity and autonomy—both the assertion and
the questioning of the primacy of individual, personal life—at its epistemological, ethical, political,
ontological, and aesthetic core.

[T]he philosophic idea of liberation and the achievement of autonomy began with and was
largely defined by, an attack on scholasticism, religious authority, and feudal power in the
name of method, skeptical inquiry and universal, disinterested reason [as with Descartes]. It
progressed to a deeper, critical investigation of the “possibility” of such reason itself [with
Kant], a kind of question that broadened into a social inquiry and so a critique of social
self-consciousness or eventually of ideology [as with Nietzsche et al.].
(Pippin 1999: 112)
[T]he most persistent kind of question continually asked within modernity [is] whether
a specific form of collective or individual independence, true self-determination, is pos-
sible; and if not, how to understand and state the nature of our “dependence” on tradition,
nature, biology, history, in general how to understand our finitude.
(Pippin 1999: 115)

According to Pippin’s controversial but plausible reading, it was Hegel who most tried “to formulate
some view of the internal logic and phenomenology of an ‘eternally’ self-determining, collective
subjectivity, of Spirit” (p. 116)—and whose effort deserves reconsideration in the wake of modern-
ists’ dissatisfactions, radical challenges (from Heidegger), or weak defenses (from Jürgen Habermas).
What might also be considered is how the dialectic of independence and dependence in engineer-
ing mirrors the problematic of a more general individualist autonomy as well as the necessarily central
role of the engineering enterprise in any conceptualization and defense of individualism (e.g., as
manifested in declarations of human rights and libertarian economics) as a viable project. How can the
human subject possibly realize its absolute worth, or practice even a measured autonomy, in the face of
the limitations presented by nature or tradition without the practice of engineering? A social ontology
in which individuals are metaphysically prior to groups would seem to depend on replacement of fam-
ily and bonded community with an engineered shopping mall where producer-consumer exchanges
trump personal interrelationships. The meaning of modernity and engineering are intertwined.
Modernism, on Pippin’s interpretation, constitutes an ongoing series of “dissatisfactions with
the affirmative, normative claims essential to European modernization.” Although the individualist,

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consumer society has become a dominant social ideal, philosophers at least since Rousseau have chal-
lenged its rationality and philosophically reproduced its features in efforts to develop their creatively
unique personal philosophies. Such is the case even with postmodernism which, although based in
an experience “of modernization as a kind of spiritual failure [or] loss,” nevertheless repeats many
of the “ideas of high culture, criticism, skepticism or enlightenment” on which modernity depends
(Pippin 1999: xi). For Pippin, the repetitive character of modernism invites a reconsideration of the
Hegelian synthesis of a broadly positive and calming response to criticisms from the initial wave of
challenges to modernity. Many of the issues at the core of those challenges and the Hegelian response
can be found echoed in the philosophy of technology and engineering in ways that can contribute
to critical reflection on the meaning of engineering.
Take the dense German philosophical dissatisfaction with Kant’s epistemology: The delimitation
of positive knowledge to perceptual appearance (what appears to us as phenomena) while affirming
the reality of an unknowable something beyond appearance (noumena) was for a post-Kantian such
as Hegel a scandal. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is a sustained argument against such a bifurca-
tion. In a parallel although admittedly less philosophically profound manner, the German engineer-
philosopher Friedrich Dessauer (1927) also wanted to affirm that humans can know noumena
through technological invention. In Dessauer’s simplified Platonism, engineer inventors acquire posi-
tive knowledge of reality that transcends perceptual appearance through invention by bringing this
supernatural reality into physical existence.
Hegel, however, anticipates Dessauer by arguing that something like a social engineering does the
same thing by bringing an ideal state into real-world existence. Hegel defends (against its critics) the
essential rationality of bourgeois society in a dialectic that finds satisfaction in recognizing, uphold-
ing, and working within traditional social role determinations, in a kind of synthesis of the classical
heroic ideal with socioeconomic progress. Is it not possible to see in the engineering experience of
design creativity within constraints, of the quotidian practice of trade-offs, a concrete manifestation
of the dynamic of civil society as a mediation between family and state? Finally, take the effort to
see and thereby introduce rationality into public affairs: Is this not precisely what is present in the
various versions of social engineering defended by figures as diverse as John Dewey, Karl Popper,
Daniel Sarewitz, and Braden Allenby, as well as Andrew Feenberg’s neo-Marxist critical theory of
technology? Engineering is the great hidden-in-plain-sight of modernity that deserves to be thought
through if we are to understand ourselves philosophically.

1.8. Conclusion
Insofar as it is a philosophical question, there is more than one possible answer to the interrogation,
“What is engineering?” Philosophically, it is possible to distinguish a number of different types of
definitions in response to “what is” questions. One incomplete but to some degree necessary first
step is simply to point out the relevant something (“That is engineering”) or list (all?) the members
of a class (“Engineering is civil engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, etc.”).
Such definitions are termed ostensive and extensional, respectively. Closely associated are prescrip-
tive and persuasive definitions: “Let engineering be taken as including all forms of making,” as some
engineering apologists have argued. Since this is what many engineers themselves think, we probably
ought to let engineers themselves have a say about what engineering is. Persuasion can be buttressed
by lexical and linguistic definitions that depend on careful analyses of semantic usage.
Efforts to provide more penetrating responses to the whatness question have involved etymologi-
cal and essential definitions. Genetic definitions aim in the same direction but replace words with
phenomena. Essential definitions are classically illustrated in Aristotle’s analyses of concepts and in
biological taxonomies that attempt to grasp whatness by means of genus (general category) and spe-
cies (differentia). The ideas of engineering as applied science or some specific form of designing or as

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 What Is Engineering?

a type of profession all exemplify this approach. However, Saul Kripke’s argument for “natural kinds”
as real but limited to scientific determination (e.g., chemical elements) deprives engineering of any
essentialness, although one could still argue in an Aristotelian manner for an essence by analogy.
In conclusion, any answer to the whatness question with regard to engineering will have strengths
and weaknesses. There is no knock-down argument in favor or one or the other because definitions
always implicate meanings, which are always (in philosophy) subject to argumentative reflection. In
the end, the best we can do is seek some degree of reflective equilibrium that takes into account both
weaknesses and strengths, minimizing the one while protecting the other.

Related Chapters
Chapter 2: A Brief History of Engineering (Jennifer Karns Alexander)
Chapter 8: Prescriptive Engineering Knowledge (Sjoerd Zwart)
Chapter 9: Engineering as Art and the Art of Engineering (Lara Schrijver)
Chapter 21: Engineering Design (Peter Kroes)
Chapter 43: Professional Codes of Ethics (Michael Davis)

Further Reading
Blockley, David. (2012). Engineering: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A senior British
civil engineer’s deft interpretation in terms of history, achievements, failures, and relationships to art, craft,
science, and technology.)
Dias, Priyan. (2019). Philosophy for Engineering: Practice, Context, Ethics, Models, Failure. Singapore: Springer Nature.
(By a Sri Lankan engineer who studied with David Blockley and has done an independent synthesis of much
western philosophical reflection.)
Madhavan, Guru. (2015). Applied Minds: How Engineers Think. New York: W.W. Norton. (Historical and con-
temporary cases illustrating successful engineering practice by a biomedical engineer at the U.S. National
Academy of Engineering.)
McCarthy, Natasha. (2009). Engineering: A Beginner’s Guide. Oxford, UK: One World. (A philosopher’s sympa-
thetic interpretation.)
Moriarty, Gene. (2008). The Engineering Project: Its Nature, Ethics, and Promise. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania
State University Press. (An electrical engineer’s effort to rethink his profession under the influence of Albert
Borgmann’s philosophy.)
Petroski, Henry. (1985). To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design. New York: St. Martin’s
Press. (Popular and influential explanation for the general public.)
Reynolds, Terry S. (ed.) (1991). The Engineer in America: A Historical Anthology from Technology and Culture. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press. (Historical analyses of key moments in the American experience.)
Van de Poel, Ibo and David Goldberg (eds.) (2010). Philosophy and Engineering: An Emerging Agenda. (A multi-
authored broad introduction.)

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