Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Sciences

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 Computational philosophy superseded linguistics in the 90s and cognitive artifacts now combine hybrid human and computer components.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.