The Allegory of the Rock Engineering Cave

Abstract

Geoscientists and engineers are part of a system that produces changes to the world we live in. As machines are expected to gradually replace humans in various technical tasks (e.g., data collection and data characterisation), it becomes crucial to apply critical thinking and to question the foundations of commonly accepted practices. The challenge is to accept that empirical methods are shaped by cognitive biases, which result from our mind interpreting data by a process of data simplification. Indeed, it is possible to draw an analogy between rock engineering methods and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The fire casting the shadows along the cave walls represents the process of quantification of qualitative assessments of commonly accepted data collection methods. The chains holding the engineers as prisoners in the cave are empirical methods accepted as industry standards despite important limitations. Engineering judgment alone will not allow engineers to break free of those chains, and to emerge from the confined spaces of the cave and see things for what they really are (i.e., introduce truly objective data collections methods that better reflect failure mechanisms). In this paper the authors use philosophical arguments to justify the need to “dequantify” the GSI classification system and to teach us that engineering design should always be driven by the important questions of how, why, and whether.