ABSTRACT
The chapter discusses the application of the philosophical schools of methodical constructivism and culturalism to contemporary issues in the philosophy of engineering and technology, as these schools have so far received comparably little attention in English-speaking countries. Their origins and relations to different lines of philosophical research are explored as well. The two methodical schools developed together since the mid-twentieth century, combining different thoughts of pragmatism, existentialism and the philosophy of language to form a comprehensive approach to a practice-based theory of science. In the following decades, argumentative patterns have been developed in which engineering can be understood in the wider range of cultural expression of human activity. A key concept with a high significance for the current philosophy of engineering practice is the principle of methodical order, where theoretical knowledge is gradually reconstructed on the basis of non-linguistic and linguistic lifeworld actions including metrology and the emergence of scale systems. Another one is the poiesis-paradigm, which reflects the methodical role of the production of measurement tools, such as proto-theories. The chapter summarizes these and other points of view including their historical preconditions, the evolution of the schools and possible areas of application in the current philosophy of engineering.
