ABSTRACT

In March 1980, the oil-platform Alexander L. Kielland capsized in the North Sea resulting in the death of 123 workers. The Norwegian inquiry into the disaster was closed to the public and the survivors' accounts of the disaster differed considerably from the official account. The inquiry was experienced as undemocratic by those who had been in the disaster. Many of them felt humiliated, claiming that their opinions were not given due weight. We argue that if the inquiry had been more transparent and inclusive, important information would have been made available that might have prevented subsequent disasters. Such transparency would be supported if disaster commissions used a critical realist version of knowledge acquisition based on a layered ontology and grounded in an epistemology that uses retroduction and judgemental rationality. In this article, critical realism is also used to justify the interdisciplinary nature of the research, which starts with historical methods.

摘要

1980 年 3 月，石油平台 Alexander L. Kielland 在北海倾覆，造成 123 名工人死亡。挪威对灾难的调查不对公众开放，幸存者对灾难的描述与官方描述有很大不同。那些经历过灾难的人认为调查是不民主的。他们中的许多人感到被羞辱，声称他们的意见没有得到应有的重视。我们认为，如果调查更加透明和包容，就可以提供重要的信息，可能会阻止随后的灾难。如果灾害委员会使用基于分层本体论并以使用追溯和判断理性的认识论为基础的知识获取的批判现实主义版本，这种透明度将得到支持。