Postmodernism and control engineering

Abstract

Modernism is defined by some important features: rationalism (the belief in knowledge through reason), empiricism (the belief in knowledge through experience) and materialism (the belief in a purely physical universe). Postmodernism is a recent movement and a reaction to modernism. The term Postmodernism was coined in the early 60's to describe the dissatisfaction with the modern architecture and became than a term for reaction to modernism in other fields as well [15]. Postmodern ideas in arts have influenced the philosophy and the analysis of culture and society. As engineers, we are interested to find out if a cultural movement, namely the postmodernism, is able to mark the scientific and the technological visions of our society, or at least, if similarities caused by the same social environment can be revealed in both fields. Since even the architecture, the domain that generated the term has an inevitable technological component, positive answers to the above mentioned quests are natural. The vice versa question is also challenging: are science and technology able to initiate and to determine global trends of the intellectual thinking? Positive answers have been already given to these questions; our chapter is meaning just to bring some personal arguments and opinions. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.