When I was younger, I wanted to be a physicist. I ended up majoring in computer engineering, because I also wanted gainful employment, but my heart was always in physics, and computer engineering seemed like a good compromise between my love of physics and early interest in computers.

I didn’t think too deeply about the philosophy of science back then, but my beliefs were in line with the school of positivism. I believed there was a single underlying reality , the nature of this reality was potentially knowable, and science was an effective tool for understanding that reality. I was vaguely aware of the postmodernist movement, but mostly by reading about the Sokal hoax, where the physicist Alan Sokal had demonstrated that postmodernism was nonsense.

Around the same time, I also read To Engineer is Human: the Role of Failure in Successful Design by the civil engineering researcher Henry Petroski. The book is a case study on how civil engineering advanced through understanding structural failures. Success, on the other hand, teaches the engineer nothing.

Many years later, I find myself operationally a postmodernist (although constructivist might be a more accurate term). When I study how incidents happen, I no longer believe that there is a single, underlying reality of what really happened that we can access. Instead, I believe that the best we can do is construct narratives based on the perspectives of the different people that were involved in the incident. These narratives will inevitably be partial, and some of them may conflict. And there are things that we will never really know or understand. In addition, contra Petroski, I also believe that we can learn from studying successes as well as from studying failure.

I suspect that most engineers are steeped in the positivist tradition of thinking as well. This change in perspective is a big one: I’m not even sure how my own thinking evolved over time, and so I don’t know how to encourage this shift in others. But I do believe that if we want to learn as much as we can from incidents, we need to work on changing how our fellow engineers think about what is knowable. And that’s a tall order.