The hermeneutics of accidents and safety

Abstract

The engineering aspects of road safety have now become so sophisticated that road accidents have seemingly reached an asymptotic level. Unfortunately this level is well above zero, and the remaining accidents seem to be due not so much to faults in the environmental interface as to carelessness and perversity. Mechanistic models of man are not well equipped to deal with these properties of men, and a different mode of explanation is sought. Hermeneutics is a discipline originally concerned with textual interpretation, which has recently been introduced into psychology, and which focuses on elucidation of the meanings of human actions. Within this framework, it is proposed that accidents are by definition meaningless events, and that the meanings of actions antecedent to accidents must be sought elsewhere than in their statistical association with the latter. The implications of this, and some directions for enquiry, are discussed in the paper.