ABSTRACT
The hermeneutic tradition since Martin Heidegger has generally been split between those who have followed Heidegger in his fundamentally relativist viewpoint, and those who have instead stressed the extent that hermeneutics is a practical method which can produce 'objective' readings. In a sense it is quite clear why incident/accident reports are so problematic, and why there is a preference for quantitative, numeric, 'hard' data, as opposed to qualitative or textual data. The fact that a 'sociological' matrix was chosen derives from work done by Reason and others, an organisational and systems viewpoint is proving to be an effective approach to the analysis of safety issues in organisations. The important aspects of the applied hermeneutic reliability trial are that it was carried out under strict conditions and that the trial measured raw agreement. With safety reports, however, people have their own biases, theories about what a report 'really' means, preferences for certain types of causes rather than others and so forth.
