Abstract
Engineering deals with different problem situations than science, and theories in engineering are different to theories in science. So, the growth of knowledge in engineering is also different to that in science. Nonetheless, methodological issues in engineering epistemology can be explored by adapting frameworks already established in the philosophy of science. In this paper I use critical rationalism and Popper’s three worlds framework to investigate error elimination and the growth of knowledge in engineering. I discuss engineering failure arising from the falsification of engineering theories, and present taxonomies of the sources of falsification and responses to falsification in engineering. From this I discuss contexts of research and design in engineering, ad hoc rescue of engineering theories, and engineering assurance.
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Notes
Brooks (1996, p. 62) says of this: “A high-energy physicist may easily spend most of his time building his apparatus; a spacecraft engineer may easily spend most of his time studying the behavior of materials in vacuum. Nevertheless, the scientist builds in order to study; the engineer studies in order to build.”
The appropriate response in this situation is not always initially clear, but ultimately one must either reject the general theory, or reject the formalisation of the new observation.
Of course, a specific theory may turn out to be false, in which case it is rejected and a new tentative theory may be proposed to replace it. See Sect. 4.1 for a discussion of ad hoc rescue of theories.
Not every artefact failure will falsify an engineering theory. Often, acceptable requirements for use are qualified by probabilistic reliability conditions. This allows the use of imprecise engineering theories that accommodate occasional failure, arising for example from inevitable variations in quality of materials used in the construction of artefacts.
Failures can be false negatives (where a bad artefact is mistakenly not identified as such) or false positives (where a good artefact is mistakenly thought to be bad). A false negative during design will not necessarily lead to a failure in use, because the artefact may satisfy its requirements in all of the specific situations in which it actually used, even though it would not function correctly in all of the specific situations it was required to be able to be used. False positives do not typically lead directly to engineering failures because the artefacts are in reality good, and as the artefacts are incorrectly deemed unsuitable, they are typically not used anyway. As well as false negatives and false positives, engineering theories may simply fail to show whether an artefact will meet its requirements. That is, theories may be indeterminate in some situations. However, like false-positive situations, indeterminate analyses do not lead to artefacts being deemed suitable for use, and so typically do not directly lead to engineering failures. In this paper I mostly focus on false-negative situations.
Some readers may wonder why an example from computing is relevant to a paper on engineering. The short answer is that computer systems engineering (including software engineering) is, from a methodological perspective, part of engineering. As argued in the previous paper (Staples 2014), computer programs as written embody a kind of objective knowledge, in World 3. Nonetheless, computer programs, when executing, are physical processes in World 1. They execute on physical hardware, and their execution leads to physical changes in usage situations. Indeed the example of TEMPEST attacks strongly supports the position that computer systems (combining hardware and software) are engineered systems, because the attacks exploit physical characteristics of the computer systems. Software as a formal entity in computer science is the wrong category of thing to be subject to physical side-channel attacks. Engineering theories about the security of software-based systems must include operational conditions and constraints on hardware in order to avoid falsification by such attacks.
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NICTA is funded by the Australian Government through the Department of Communications and the Australian Research Council through the ICT Centre of Excellence Program.
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Staples, M. Critical rationalism and engineering: methodology. Synthese 192, 337–362 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0571-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0571-6