Detangling Safety Knowledge with Contextualism

We have contradictory intuitions about knowing that things are safe: on the one hand, we claim to have knowledge that many systems (even complex ones) are safe in ordinary language. On the other hand, when challenged by an expert, we easily admit that we do not, in fact, possess very much safety knowledge at all. This Technical Memorandum (TM) attempts to reconcile these two competing intuitions using a philosophical view called epistemic contextualism.
We can use epistemic contextualism to explain the importance of safety regulations and the goal in implementing them: first, to differentiate types of disagreement and establish a common basis upon which regulators and regulatees can know that a system is safe; second, to raise ordinary consumers’ standards for safety knowledge (given adequate knowledge of the comprehensiveness of the regulation). This TM also uses the contextualist framework of relevant alternatives to elucidate types of failure possibilities and explain complications in attempts to prevent common mode failures.