What is Engineering Knowledge? - Royal Academy of Engineering

A Philosophy of Engineering Seminar:
What is Engineering Knowledge?
29 Great Peter Street
London SW1P 3LW
Monday 27 November 2006
2.00 pm – 5.30pm

What is Engineering Knowledge?
This is the first in a series of public seminars on the philosophy of engineering run by The
Royal Academy of Engineering. The series aims to explore philosophical issues that arise in
engineering research and practice. This seminar will examine the nature of engineering
knowledge, addressing questions such as: What are the intellectual foundations of
engineering? What is engineering knowledge, and what is it to have engineering
knowledge? What can philosophers learn from engineering about knowledge? Do
engineering and science share a common goal in the quest for knowledge, and do they
make equal contributions to our knowledge of the natural world?
Future seminars will be held on the following topics: systems engineering and engineering
design; AI and IT – where philosophy and engineering meet; metaphysics and engineering;
engineering and environmental philosophy; education and the philosophy of engineering.
Professor Peter Lipton
Peter Lipton is the Hans Rausing Professor and Head of the Department of the History and
Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King's College. His
philosophical interests include the structures of explanation and inference in science, the
nature of scientific progress, social epistemology, the relation between science and religion,
and biomedical ethics. Selected publications are available at:
www.hps.cam.ac.uk/dept/lipton.html
Engineering and Truth: One of the central questions in the philosophy of science is whether
science is in the truth business: whether science is producing increasingly accurate and
comprehensive representations of a largely unobservable world. On the positive side, there is
the striking predictive success of our best scientific theories. On the negative side there is the
history of science, a history of theories which were predictively successful for a time but were
later found to be fundamentally mistaken. This debate over truth has focused on pure science;
we need to consider how the situation changes if we focus instead on engineering.
Dr Kieron O’Hara
Kieron O’Hara is a senior research fellow in Electronics and Computer Science at the University
of Southampton, with particular interests in the technology and politics of knowledge. He is
the author of ‘Plato and the Internet’, ‘Trust: From Socrates to Spin’, ‘After Blair: Conservatism
Beyond Thatcher’, ‘The Referendum Roundabout’ and ‘inequality.com: Power, Poverty and the
Digital Divide’, and has written a long review of the science of the web with Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
His next book (Feb 07) is a study of David Cameron, and he is currently writing a book with
Professor Nigel Shadbolt on technology and privacy.
Plato and the Internet: Technological developments such as the World Wide Web and
e-science have led to an explosion in the amount of knowledge to which we have access. At
the same time, economic imperatives are driving us to exploit the competitive advantage that
knowledge provides. But the study of knowledge – epistemology – does not reflect these
developments, and addresses problems that are fundamentally those that Plato addressed in

his epistemological works: knowledge is seen as a capacity characteristic of human beings, and
the major issue to be addressed is scepticism.
But this framework does not provide useful support in the engineering and technological
context. Rather, we need to understand that knowledge can be held and acted upon by other
agents than humans, including animals, computers, systems and organisations. In this context,
the fundamental problem of epistemology is how any agent extracts information from its
environment and acts upon it.
Professor Sir Tony Hoare FREng FRS
Tony Hoare took a degree in Lit. Hum. from Oxford University in 1956. As an undergraduate, he
was inspired by his philosophy tutor John Lucas to pursue his interests in symbolic logic and
computing. His working career started in 1960 as a computer programmer with a small British
computer manufacturer, and since 1999 he has been a computer researcher at Microsoft
Research Ltd. Cambridge. In between, he had a distinguished academic career at the Queen’s
University, Belfast and at Oxford University, and set up the first computing degree programmes
in both universities. His long-term research goal has been to place the engineering of software
on a firm basis of scientific theory.
The Logic of Engineering Design: This seminar will describe the speaker’s philosophy of the
specification, design and implementation of software products and services. It will show how
the justification for the correctness of designs and implementations can be given by
elementary logical reasoning – in fact by propositional logic.
Schedule (All talks will be followed by a short question session):
2.00pm: Dr Keith Guy FREng: Chair’s introduction
2.05pm: Professor Peter Lipton: ‘Engineering and Truth’
2.55pm: Professor Sir Tony Hoare FREng FRS: ‘The Logic of Engineering Design’
3.45pm: Break for coffee
4.00pm: Dr Kieron O’Hara: Plato and the Internet: Liberating Knowledge from Our Heads’
4.50pm: Panel discussion
5.25pm: Closing remarks by the Chair
For further information, please contact Dr Natasha McCarthy at
natasha.mccarthy@raeng.org.uk or tel. 020 7227 0575

Miss S Hearn
The Royal Academy of Engineering
29 Great Peter Street
LONDON
SW1P 3LW

What is Engineering Knowledge?
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