Metaphysics of Engineering

Abstract

The central questions of this chapter are: What is the setting of a learned work of engineering? Is that setting unique to engineering? The chapter argues that there are at least two settings: one, the real world in which engineering employs methods that seem to simulate the methods of mathematics and science; the other, the hyperreal world known as the assigned world in which engineering employs no simulations. While the question of uniqueness invites a more exhaustive inquiry into many learned disciplines than ventured herein, it can be said that when engineering is done in the real world it is done differently in some ways from mathematics and science, and that neither mathematics nor science is done in a hyperreal world whose natural laws are made from authoritative imperatives.