SA Anno 1995: A Commitment to the 17th Century

Abstract

In providing reflections on 25 years of situation awareness (SA) research, particularly the ever-popular 1995 model of SA, our response is twofold. First, we ask whether the model’s grasp has exceeded its epistemological reach. By overlooking important insights from the second cognitive revolution as well as from other late-20th-century developments in (social) science, it might well do that. In fact, SA, in its 1995 model, is strongly committed to a 17th-century ontology that separates mind from matter and sees awareness as a correspondence or mirror of the world outside. This view seems to strongly reverberate today in a somewhat dogmatic stance of the 1995 model about the role that the world and cognitive artifacts play in constituting cognitive processes. Second, we suggest that after 25 years of SA, we might need to reflect on what SA as a scientific human factors object has brought us or the operators we once set out to support. This is not a trivial or academic question. We know of one operator who is in jail today because the prosecution was able to successfully argue for the dereliction of his duty to maintain SA. Without the human factors community supplying this object, he might still be in jail, but surely not under this charge.