PSI - Issue 37

Fekete, Tamás et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 37 (2022) 779–787

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Fekete, T .: The Fundaments of Structural Integrity … / Structural Integrity Procedia 00 (2021) 000 – 000

Fig. 1. The four-level architecture of the Generalized Conceptual Framework to Structural Integrity for LSPSs – after Rousseau (2017) –

3.2. Summary of key philosophical findings Over the past century, the literature on science and engineering has seen a significant decline in the body of publications that have focused on the philosophical foundations of scientific achievement, and philosophy may have seemed to be losing its relevance for those working with natural and engineering sciences – Cellucci (2017) – . Contrary to this, if one goes back to the ancient definition of philosophy as ‘ the way acquiring of knowledge ’ – Cellucci (2017 1.) – and adapts it to present context, its importance for those working in science and engineering will become hopefully more widely recognised. There are several methods proposed to acquire knowledge in philosophy; the version of the ‘ Analytic Method ’ propo sed by Cellucci (2017 158 – 160.) was chosen, because it is compatible with Gödel's incompleteness theorems – Cellucci (2017 180.) – , open systems – Cellucci (2017 179.) – and models of science – Cellucci (2017 173.) – , as well as models in science – Cellucci (2017 184.) – . Philosophical considerations have been used to come to postulates and hypotheses essential for further scientific investigations of the subject. For the rest of the paper, two key postulates are introduced, as follows: • Postulate of dynamic presentism : all the objects composing our world are finite and ‘ exist dynamically ’ – Golosz (2017, 2021) – , which is characterised by the following sub-postulates (S1) – (S3): (S1): ‘the notion of dynamic existence is “ tensed ” ’ – Golosz (2021) – , in the sense that one can speak ‘about what dynamically existed (the past), what dynamically exist (the present), and what will dynamically exist (the future)’, so past, present and future can clearly be distinguished; (S2): objects ‘ that dynamically exist endure’, i.e., the objects ‘ endure, when they persist over time, keeping their strict identity’ Golosz (2021 ); (S3): ‘ events (which are acts of acquiring, losing, or changing properties by dynamically existing things and their collections) dynamically exist in the sense of coming to pass ’ Golosz (2021). • Dissipation postulate : ‘ dissipation occurs naturally and inevitably in our world – starting from the smallest to the largest length-scales of interest –’ Fekete (2019), after Öttinger (2017) . The following important remarks concerning the two postulates are presented here: (1) ‘… the future is (or seems to be) open, while the past is fixed’, because events – as defined in (S3) – ‘dynamically exist in the sense of coming to pass’; ( 2 ) ‘the endurin g things – one can say metaphorically –‘ exist in a future -oriented dynamic sense, carrying traces of past interactions within them, consequently … ‘convey traces of the past into the future’; ( 3) and for the same reasons, ‘things can impact on future events with no possibility of having an impact on the past’ Golosz (2021) ; (4) by the very definition of dynamic presentism, the lifetime of a dynamically existing object is finite. The conjoint use of the ‘dynamic presentism’ and the ‘dissipation’ postulate implies that (5) dissipative mechanisms are intrinsically involved in the memorization of traces of past events in the corresponding objects, and (6) memories of the entire prior life history of an object can influence the reactions of that object to an event in process. The dynamic presentism postulate makes inevitable the introduction of time-dependent description into scientific theories crucial to SI of LSPSs , but without the need of further cumbersome investigations, clearly fixes time to be an oriented (i.e., asymmetric) concept . While the dynamic presentism postulate expresses the asymmetric behaviour of time, the dissipation postulate is about the asymmetric behaviour of nonequilibrium processes in time. The combined use of the two postulates is an expression of the fact that the systems (i.e., LSPSs ) to be described at scientific level are understood as non-equilibrium systems. Consequently, Modern Thermodynamics can serve as an adequate tool for