This second companion volume on engineering studies considers engineering practice including contextual analyses of engineering identity, epistemologies and values. Key overlapping questions examine such issues as an engineering identity, engineering self-understandings enacted in the professional world, distinctive characters of engineering knowledge and how engineering science and engineering design interact in practice. -/- Authors bring with them perspectives from their institutional homes in Europe, North America, Australia\ and Asia. The volume includes 24 contributions by more than 30 authors from engineering, the (...) social sciences and the humanities. Additional issues the chapters scrutinize include prominent norms of engineering, how they interact with the values of efficiency or environmental sustainability. A concluding set of articles considers the meaning of context more generally by asking if engineers create their own contexts or are they created by contexts. -/- Taken as a whole, this collection of original scholarly work is unique in its broad, multidisciplinary consideration of the changing character of engineering practice. (shrink)

Hilary Putnam and Nelson Goodman are two of the twentieth century's most persuasive critics of metaphysical realism, however they disagree about the consequences of rejecting metaphysical realism. Goodman defended a view he called irrealism in which minds literally make worlds, and Putnam has sought to find a middle path between metaphysical realism and irrealism. I argue that Putnam's middle path turns out to be very elusive and defend a dichotomy between metaphysical realism and irrealism.

In the present paper, I try to defend a coherent interpretation of Goodman’s relativism by responding to the main objections of the critics. I also discuss the significance of his pluralism by relating it to the notion of construction. This will show the relevance of Goodman’s philosophy for the present days.

The book has two interrelated objectives. One objective is meta-theoretical and concerns the exploration of theoretical debates connected to issues of studying society and environmental problems; another objective is empirical/analytical, referring to the analysis of "green" public participation in the electricity and waste sectors in Sweden, and partly in the Netherlands as well as the UK. The metatheoretical part draws the conclusion that the ontology of critical realism, combined with a problem-subjectivist tenet, is a particularly fruitful basis for the social (...) sciences in order to provide an understanding environmental conflicts. The empirical questions refer to preconditions and obstacles to public participations in the "greening" of the domestic practices related to electricity and waste. Methodologically, the empirical part is based on a combination of statistical data and comparative case study research, conducted through semi-structured interviews with local authorities, housing organizations, energy companies, a windpower cooperative, and households. The challenges of providers are divided into making visible, making acceptable, and making doable, based on both material and socio-political characteristics of the sectors. Households, in turn, face the challenges of constructing combinations of green identity as a foundation of their motivation: ecological, environmental, economic, and social green identities. The study shows how differences in identity-combinations across cases-although materially influenced-are rarely materially determined in any irrevocable way. Instead, policy reform may substantially strengthen the social support of action-motivating combinations of green identities. (shrink)

I offer a diagnosis of the parallelism between the Doctrine of Potential Parts and the Doctrine of Potential Wholes and briefly examine its bearing on Johansson’s account of the Tibbles-Tib Problem.