ABSTRACT
Key Points .............................................................................................................. 115 Why Losing SA Is Dangerous ............................................................................... 116 Dualism in Situation Awareness............................................................................. 118
River of Consciousness ..................................................................................... 122 Matter versus Mind ........................................................................................... 122 Ground Truth and Aperspectival Objectivity .................................................... 123
If You Lose SA, What Replaces It? ........................................................................124 Empiricism and the Perception of Elements .......................................................... 129
Experiments, Empiricism, and Situation Awareness ......................................... 131 Information Processing .......................................................................................... 133
Mechanization of Mind ..................................................................................... 134 Gestalt ............................................................................................................... 135
Meaning-Making .................................................................................................... 136 Second Cognitive Revolution ............................................................................ 137
Radical Empiricism ................................................................................................ 138 Rejecting Dualism ............................................................................................. 138
Peering wearily into the cradle of the concept in the mid-nineties, aviation safety veteran Charlie Billings wondered in front of a large audience of human factors scientists whether the intercession of “situation awareness” was necessary to explain what causes people to see, or miss, or remember seeing something. “It’s a construct!” he said in the keynote at a foundational conference on situation awareness. “Constructs cannot cause anything!” (Billings 1996). But apparently they do. Charlie Billings passed away in 2010. By then, loss of situation awareness (i.e., loss of a construct) had become the favored cause for an epidemic of automation and human performancerelated mishaps in aviation, shipping, manufacturing, and other settings. Many reports produced by Safety investigators (ATSB 1996) contain references to a “loss of situation awareness.” Investigators at the US National Transportation Safety Board, too, have used “loss of situation awareness” in all its putative causal power more than once. For example, it allowed them to “explain” why a regional airline crew took off from the wrong runway at Lexington airport in Kentucky in 2006, resulting in the deaths of 49 people including the captain (NTSB 2007b). Apparently, our constructs contain enough causal power for them to blame the dead. Or the living. The coroner who investigated a friendly fire incident that killed three British soldiers in Afghanistan in 2007 rendered the verdict that the crew of an American fighter jet had lost “situational awareness” and were looking at the wrong village when they dropped the bomb (Bruxelles 2010, p. 1).
