ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an understanding of what errors might be generated through the reasoning, understanding, and decision-making process, what to do with them, and how to integrate them in the evaluation of the system. It focuses on medical error and harm, a particular challenge in thinking and reasoning. Although the web of latent or active errors leading to incidents may be complex, there is always an operator at the end who introduces or fails to introduce necessary elements into his or her reasoning, understanding, and decision-making to avoid such failures. Latent error or failure may then be human, technical, external, and/or design-construction-material related. A step by step evaluation of both argumentation and cognition processes must contribute to improvements in the medical error domain. The types of faults fall into the world of fallacies, biases, and cognitive errors. The sources of error at the individual level may include inadequate knowledge, attitudes, and skills as well as poor critical thinking and argumentation.
