George Varghese
PHIL 315
Prof. Mark Manion
A critical analysis of FTAs in light of Scientism, Positivism and Reductionism
Fault Tree Analyses (or FTA) are the most common and most widely used method for testing the reliability, trustworthiness and safety of Engineered systems (Manion, 6). This method of risk assessment, however, has many inherent flaws and unless they are addressed and suitably rectified, any analysis that results from this method will be incorrect and a misinterpretation of the safety/risk factor of an engineering system.
Scientism, positivism and reductionism are three ideologies that played a very important part in modeling the system of FTA , down to the point where FTA were (and are) treated like they are a totally objective science with no subjective component whatsoever. This assumption however, is severely inconsistent as FTA inherently has components in every stage of design, analysis and implementation that rely heavily on subjectivism and personal preference of designer of the FTA
Fault tree analysis is NOT a perfect science, and all ideologies that impose that it is, are simply contributing to deficiencies in the system, by turning a blind eye to the immense subjectivity involved in the process.
Scientism assumes that natural science is the basis of all knowledge, and true knowledge can only really come from some form of natural science. If this were true, given the same parameters and background information, two FTAs designed for the same engineering system would have to be exactly the same, in the same way that two mathematical models for ,say, a Stoichiometric process would yield the same result. However, it has been shown that two experts could design two totally dissimilar FTA models even though they were provided with the same information. This proves that subjectivism exists in design of FTAs at a very fundamental level, thus the assumption of scientism is flawed and even possibly ignorant.