Human language is inherently ambiguous. Most words have multiple meanings, which are subject to change from time to time and from place to place. Even the correct pronunciation of the same arrangement of letters can vary, and the only way to tell which is correct is by taking the context into account. “Did you read my column last time?” “Yes, I read it.” …

My title this month comes from a collection of essays that resulted from a June 2004 meeting in Matfield Green, Kansas, which is a small town in the Flint Hills – one of my favorite landscapes – roughly a two-hour drive from my home. Edited by Bill Vitek and Wes Jackson, The University Press of Kentucky published it in 2008 with the subtitle, Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge. The SEI Engineering Philosophy Committee was intrigued by the book’s provocative name and decided to read and discuss it together. What follows are some of my own reflections. …

The second chapter of psychologist Jerome Bruner’s 1986 book, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, begins as follows:

There are two modes of cognitive functioning … each providing distinctive ways of ordering experience, of constructing reality. The two (though complementary) are irreducible to one another. Efforts to reduce one mode to the other or to ignore one at the expense of the other inevitably fail to capture the rich diversity of thought. (p. 11) …

Writing is hard work for most people, myself included. Mozart supposedly finished entire musical compositions in his head before committing any of the notes to paper, but for almost everyone else, our minds simply do not work that way. As David Hare put it, “The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.” I have certainly found that to be true when preparing these columns over the years. …

Robert J. Fitterer’s book, Love and Objectivity in Virtue Ethics, published in 2008 by University of Toronto Press, brings together several topics that I have discussed to various extents in past columns: …

Regular readers of this column know that more often than not it addresses some aspect of the relationship between philosophy and engineering. It should thus be no surprise that I am eager to discuss a recent book called Philosophy and Engineering: Reflections on Practice, Principles and Process, edited by Diane P. Michelfelder, Natasha McCarthy, and David E. Goldberg, and published by Springer. …

Virtue ethics has been around for at least 2,500 years, and the classic work about it will always be Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. However, contemporary proponents must address a wide range of additional issues and objections that have come up over the intervening centuries, including those raised by modern alternative approaches like deontology and consequentialism (“Rethinking Engineering Ethics,” November 2010). …

I have written previously about the shift in modern philosophy and culture away from practical judgment (phronesis) in favor of technical rationality (techne), primarily citing the work of Joseph Dunne (“Knowledge, Rationality, and Judgment,” July 2012; “The Rationality of Practice,” September 2012). Recently, I have encountered several other authors who have observed the same trend and called attention to its detrimental impacts on society. …

Welcome to a rare instance when this column has nothing to do with engineering or philosophy!

Ever since I spent several days in New Mexico with my family during a vacation last summer, I feel like the abundant sunshine and thin, dry air have put me under some kind of spell. …

I have previously (and repeatedly) cited a paper by philosophers Allison Ross and Nafsika Athanassoulis that highlights the risk-taking nature of engineering practice and draws out some of the associated ethical implications. In two additional papers (“A Virtue Ethical Account of Making Decisions About Risk,” Journal of Risk Research, Vol. 13, No. 2, March 2010, pp. 217-230; “Risk and Virtue Ethics,” chapter 33 in Handbook of Risk Theory, Springer, 2012), the same authors discuss risk in a more general sense and argue convincingly that virtue ethics provides the most adequate approach for dealing with it. …