Deconstructive Evaluation of Risk In Dependability Arguments and Safety Cases.pdfVIP

School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne Safe Systems: Construction, Destruction, and Deconstruction J. M. Armstrong and S. P. Paynter Technical Report Series CS-TR-830 March 2004 c Copyright2004 University of Newcastle upon Tyne Published by the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, School of Computing Science, Claremont Tower, Claremont Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK. Safe Systems: Construction, Destruction, and Deconstruction JM Armstrong Senior Research Associate, Centre for Software Reliability, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, Newcastle Upon Tyne, United Kingdom SE Paynter Senior Principal Engineer, MBDA UK Ltd, Filton, Bristol, United Kingdom 1 Introduction Deconstructive Evaluation of Risk In Dependability Arguments and Safety Cases (DERIDASC) is a study focussed on the language used by safety engineers in their intellectual discourse. The DERIDASC project is inter-disciplinary in the sense that it experiments with techniques from philosophy, literary theory (Eagleton 1996, Culler 1997) and semiotics (Barthes 1994, Cobley 2001, Culler 2001) to diagnose problems of language, definition, and interpretation in safety engineering. The project aims to make safety engineers re-think and improve some of their habitual definitions. The project adopts methods of textual analysis usually found only in studies of the arts and literature, although the kinds of textual studies we propose have also been influential in the discipline of law