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130Reconstructing Past Events: A Study of Engineering Failure InvestigationsDissertation, Stanford University. 2020.When a major engineering product failed, a failure investigation is often conducted to prevent similar failures in the future. In this dissertation, I propose an account of the epistemology and methodology of engineering failure investigations, based on a close examination of the documentations on five major plane crash investigations conducted by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). The dissertation is divided into three parts. The first part consists of the five case studies arrang…Read more
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15Criteria of success for engineering accident investigations: a question-centered accountEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Science 14 (16): 1-30. 2024.Engineering accident investigations are systematic inquiries into the facts and causes of engineering accidents. The aims of an engineering accident investigation include identifying significant truths about an accident, learning lessons to prevent similar future accidents, and authoritatively communicating the investigative results to the stakeholders. An important normative dimension along which an engineering accident investigation can be evaluated is its degree of success in fulfilling these…Read more
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99Feature dependence: A method for reconstructing actual causes in engineering failure investigationsStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 96 100-111. 2022.Engineering failure investigations seek to reconstruct the actual causes of major engineering failures. The investigators need to establish the existence of certain past events and the actual causal relationships that these events bear to the failures in question. In this paper, I examine one method for reconstructing the actual causes of failure events, which I call "feature dependence". The basic idea of feature dependence is that some features of an event are informative about the features of…Read more
Yafeng Wang
Institute of Philosophy, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIP)
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Institute of Philosophy, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIP)Post-doctoral Fellow
Stanford University
PhD, 2020