Warrants engineering experience

Experts (in the broad sense that I have used the term) frequently deploy more than one type of warrant to make judgments as conditions warrant. But these warrants are not interchangeable. Scientific knowledge and engineering experience are closely related to the extent that they operate most visibly in the domain of the verbal and analytic (e.g., knowledge perceived and interpreted through instrumentation, written reports, and inscriptions). But this apparent similarity may mask differences in the nature of these warrants and the implications of each type of warrant for future policy and procedure. ... 

As Petroski concludes, trial and error is fundamental to a notion of engineer-ing experience that builds upon past events in order to design structures that will solve problems in the future. In order for engineering experience to provide a reliable index of future action, engineers must assume that responses in the future will be predictable that actions in the past can predict future consequences and thus, that particular features of the material environment can act as predictable indices of future actions. MSHA investigates accidents to identify the technical cause (or causes) of accidents so that agencies can prevent similar occurrences in the future. But engineering experience must be adapted to new sites and situations in order to provide a warrant for action. 

In acknowledging the role of embodied experience as a warrant for judgments about risk, this chapter does not argue for a return to some romantic past when workers learned safety at their fathers knees. Nor does it argue against funding for research to improve engineering controls and. scientific... 

Because they cannot willfully experiment with human lives in local sites, engineers have turned to scientific methods of analysis and experimentation to provide generalizable warrants that can be applied across a variety of sites and situations. 

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