Abstract
It is not uncommon to describe the efforts of engineers, the results of these efforts and the specific knowledge employed in normative terms. Take, for instance, ‘The engineer, and more generally the designer, is concerned with how things ought to be – how they ought to be in order to attain goals, and to function’ (Simon 1981: 7).
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Notes
- 1.
In this chapter, the efforts of engineers are labelled designing, the results of their efforts are technologies or artefacts, and the specific knowledge employed is technological knowledge. Occasionally, efforts, results and knowledge are indiscriminately referred to as ‘technology’, employing the ambiguity of this notion, which may refer to a system of knowledge, a system of objects (Mitcham 1978) and a set of (institutionalised) practices – as in usage of the term ‘information technology’.
- 2.
Here and throughout this chapter, I take ‘prescriptive’ as a synonym of ‘normative’, that is, as ‘concerned with norms or directives’. Thus, prescriptive statements include (expressions of) rules, recommendations and requirements.
- 3.
The aim must be phrased in terms of prescriptive content of knowledge to avoid triviality: on non-naturalist conceptions, all knowledge involves norms on beliefs and is therefore ‘prescriptive’. The guiding idea behind this chapter is that, in addition to the norms on knowledge, there are norms in some knowledge, that is, it is about prescriptions.
- 4.
The aim is not even to capture the only or the only important prescriptive part of technological knowledge. Another part, not discussed in this chapter, consists of the category-specified value statements (e.g. ‘This is a good bridge’) identified by Hansson (2006).
- 5.
Bunge’s later work differs marginally from Bunge (1966).
- 6.
Interestingly, Bunge does not discuss the ‘rules of science’ in his paper.
- 7.
Here, the analysis connects to the notion of ‘practical norm’ introduced by Von Wright (1963) and, indirectly, to the analysis of instrumental knowledge given by Niiniluoto (1993). Like Bunge, Niiniluoto aims at understanding applied research through focussing on relations between means (actions) and ends. His discussion and its relation to the present analysis are complicated, however, by Niiniluoto’s insistence on distinguishing between technology, which concerns actions and is evaluated in terms of its effectiveness, and instrumental knowledge, which concerns technical norms and is evaluated in terms of truth. This raises the question whether technical norms are indeed truth candidates (an issue Von Wright stays agnostic about) and the question how technology and instrumental knowledge are related, although they involve different core values. I submit that the plan analysis clarifies the relation while restoring Von Wright’s agnosticism but will not substantiate this here.
- 8.
The plan analysis does not systematically distinguish between contributions to goal realisation by objects and by other people. Like plans may require artefacts to manifest dispositions (e.g. to conduct heat or electricity), they may require actions taken by people (e.g. drive your train).
- 9.
The general merits and difficulties of a plan-centred approach are not considered here. Planning may or may not, for instance, be reducible to a series of intention formations; this is irrelevant for present purposes as long as the (possibly irreducible) concept of use plans can be used to analyse artefact design and use, and the prescriptive content of technological knowledge.
- 10.
This characterisation of designing resembles Herbert Simon’s: ‘Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones’ (1981, p.129).
- 11.
The effectiveness standard on plans may be so fundamental that the very notion of ‘plan’ incorporates a measure of effectiveness. If I would try to find extraterrestrial life by reading The Waste Land in my roof garden, I would not be executing an irrational plan, but no plan at all (e.g. because my house has no roof garden).
- 12.
- 13.
Calling knowledge of plans ‘procedural knowledge’ matches usage of the latter term in AI (Georgeff and Lansky 1987). The term is also used in cognitive psychology (e.g. Anderson 1981), where it indicates knowledge of how to realise a goal, that is, what we have called ‘instrumental knowledge’; cognitive psychologists contrast procedural knowledge with declarative knowledge, which we would call ‘descriptive’.
- 14.
This touches upon a deeper worry regarding the status of procedural knowledge as knowledge, namely, whether knowledge of a plan is a candidate for being true. The standards of practical rationality may distinguish good and bad examples of this type, but this does not resolve whether it is a properly epistemic type.
- 15.
See Hughes (2009) and Hughes’ contribution to this volume for a way to make the connection between plans and means-end reasoning more explicit.
- 16.
Nelson and Winter and their successors model technological and organisational change as an evolutionary process, by looking at generations of populations of organisations and organisational routines, connected by the core Darwinian mechanisms of variation, selection and retention. Here, organisations may be allowed to change their routines over time, introducing the required divisions between generations on the level of temporal stages of organisations (say, fiscal years). Alternatively, organisations may not be allowed to change routines, dividing generations by moments at which new organisations may enter the market and/or unsuccessful ones disappear. The application of the plan analysis in this chapter is supposed to be neutral with respect to these two modelling approaches.
- 17.
- 18.
Assuming, for the moment, that these taxonomies stand up to critical scrutiny.
- 19.
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Acknowledgments
Research for this chapter was made possible by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. Helpful comments on an earlier version were given by Marieke van Holland, Auke Pols and Krist Vaesen.
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Houkes, W.N. (2013). Rules, Plans and the Normativity of Technological Knowledge. In: de Vries, M., Hansson, S., Meijers, A. (eds) Norms in Technology. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5243-6_3
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