ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the most important aspects of prescriptive engineering knowledge. This knowledge concerns explicit normative recommendations of physical engineering actions intended to achieve a specific technical goal within a definite engineering context. It gives examples to illustrate the extent to which prescriptive knowledge plays a prominent role in engineering practices, and discusses the distinctive conceptual characteristics of prescriptive engineering knowledge, comparing them with those of descriptive knowledge. It summarizes the interactions of models of descriptive and prescriptive knowledge, which information and management engineers have developed in the absence of epistemological theory. The chapter also outlines specific engineering strategies to validate prescriptive knowledge—a task not yet accomplished elsewhere in the literature. Finally, to illustrate the reluctance of scientists to include prescriptive knowledge within science, it discusses an eliminativist picture of prescriptive knowledge. It concludes that all these aspects clearly display the urge to emancipate prescriptive knowledge as in independent goal in engineering and to study it for its own sake.
