โ Scribed by Erik Hollnagel
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
The human part of man-machine systems is generally described in physicalistic terms, as if man was a machine. Although this is in good agreement with the tendency of behavioral science to emulate natural science, it is inherently wrong because it obscures where our knowledge is deficient. Physicalistic descriptions can only capture those aspects of man which submit to the metaphor of the machine, and must fail to account for the rest. This inadequacy of the physicalistic approach becomes gradually more clear, as the complexity of man-machine systems increases. Humans, unlike machines, are not designed explicitly as parts of man-machine systems, but have rather a plethora of capacities of which some are beneficial and some detrimental to the functioning of the system. Since we cannot simply add to the physicalistic descriptions, the alternative is to describe man on his own premises--essentially a psychological description with full recognition of the characteristics of man--and then later combine the physicalistic description of the machine with the psychological description of man. This approach makes it clear that there are a number of important things that we do not know about man-machine systems. For instance, how performance is shaped, how strategies are formed, how mistakes in decisions occur, how tasks can be meaningfully analyzed, etc. Only by detatching ourselves from the traditional physicalistic approach and realizing where the problems lie, can we hope to make significant progress in our knowledge of man-machine systems.
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