Keynotes
Erik Fisher, Arizona State University:
Necessary Conditions for the Duty Plus Respicere: Explicating the Capacity of Engineers to “Take More into Account”
Scheduled in Room A on Tuesday the 17th September 10:20 – 11:10.
Philosophers and policy makers have long debated whether engineers should integrate social and ethical considerations into their technical work practices. For instance, Carl Mitcham claims that engineers are bound by the ethical duty plus respicere (Latin for "take more into account"), while others question the utility and even the possibility of such integration. Drawing on over a decade of qualitative empirical results from hundreds of socio-technical dialogues that follow the STIR method, this talk will argue that engineers' capacity to "take more into account" is a dynamic, temporally unfolding, potentially engageable phenomenon. Given its status as a microfoundation for Responsible Innovation, attempts to understand, assess, and design responsible futures should be sensitive to the conditions under which this integrative capacity of engineers both expands and contracts.
Mieke Boon, University of Twente:
Epistemological Responsibility of Engineers
Scheduled in Room A on Wednesday the 18th September 17:40 – 18:30.
The theme for this fPET2024 conference, Understanding, Assessing, and Designing Responsible Futures, points at the importance of both ethics and scientific research. Yet, in the philosophy of technology, the connection between the two has hardly been thematized – that is, the connection between the moral ambition to do good through responsible engineering design, on the one hand, and the question of how scientific research (aimed at ‘understanding and assessing’) contributes to this ambition on the other. My explanation for this blind spot concerns the traditional assumptions and beliefs that both philosophers and scientists have about 'real science’ and about how science contributes to technological development [1]. More radically, I have argued that, in order to understand the contribution of science to problem-solving, an alternative to the traditional paradigm of what science ‘really’ is (the ‘physics paradigm’) needs to be found, which could be called ‘an engineering paradigm of science’ [2], [3]. Crucial to this alternative paradigm of science is the central role of ‘models as epistemic tools’ (and, rather than ‘models as (literal) representations’) [4]. The view on scientific (and conceptual) models within an engineering paradigm of science makes clear how the epistemological responsibility of researchers comes into play [5]. This alternative view of the interconnectedness of scientific research aimed at responsible engineering design and epistemological responsibility of researchers therein, has significant implications for ideas about engineering education aimed at preparing engineers to contribute to responsible futures. In this keynote, I will elaborate on the ideas summarized here and illustrate how these insights have led to a new educational design [6].
[1] Boon, M. (2011). In Defense of Engineering Sciences: On the Epistemological Relations Between Science and Technology. Techne: Research in Philosophy & Technology, 15(1).
[2] Boon, M. (2017). An engineering paradigm in the biomedical sciences: Knowledge as epistemic tool. Progress in biophysics and molecular biology, 129, 25-39. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2017.04.001
[3] Boon, M., & Van Baalen, S. (2019). Epistemology for interdisciplinary research–shifting philosophical paradigms of science. European journal for philosophy of science, 9(1), 16. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-018-0242-4
[4] Boon, M., & Knuuttila, T. (2009). Models as epistemic tools in engineering sciences. In Philosophy of technology and engineering sciences (pp. 693-726). North-Holland.
[5] Boon, M. (2020). Scientific methodology in the engineering sciences. In The Routledge handbook of the philosophy of engineering (pp. 80-94). Routledge.
[6] The transdisciplinary ‘high-tech-human-touch 30 ECTS minor program ICR&TIST (Intelligence, Creativity, and Responsible Technological Innovations in Societal Transformations).
https://www.utwente.nl/en/education/student-services/news-events/news/2022/6/678748/transdisciplinary-cbl-minor-icrtist
Astrid Linder, Chalmers University of Technology:
Inclusive crash safety assessment – past, present, and future
Scheduled in Room A on Thursday the 19th September, 16:15 - 17:05.
How is occupant safety in the event of a crash assessed today and what is needed to make it inclusive? Today, 2024, occupant safety of the occupant of a car is done using a model of an average male as the driver. How did we get there and what are the steps needed to be taken to address the whole adult population in the assessment of vehicle occupant safety? And why is it important (in addition to that women exist)? These questions will be addressed together with a description of the latest development in the assessment of crash safety. The results of a recent finished EU-funded project, VIRTUAL, that contain physical models representing us in the event of a crash, will be presented.