Can Uncertainty Be Quantified?

Hansson, Sven Ove

doi:10.1162/posc_a_00412

Cited by 15 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…We do not want to reignite the old controversy regarding the possibility of applying probability to all kinds of events and for all types of uncertainty. 6 Nevertheless, in line with Hansson (2022), we think that not all forms of uncertainty can be easily handled by probabilities, or even formalised or quantified. For instance, forms of interactive uncertainty involving the mutual behaviours occurring between individuals or between institutions and individuals can be at least qualitatively assessed and formalised with epistemic game theory (Chiffi & Pietarinen, 2017;Perea, 2012), while we do not possess any way to formalise or quantify forms of agential uncertainty related to the behaviour of one's own future actions (in particular about whether one will implement the decision that one makes) or structural uncertainty, which concerns the structure and the proper delimitations of decisions, including uncertainty about which options are really available to people, and uncertainty about the spatial and temporal boundaries of their decisions (in particular, how far in the future the outcomes considered will occur).…”

Section: Varieties Of Technological Innovation: Existing Taxonomiesmentioning

confidence: 97%

Types of Technological Innovation in the Face of Uncertainty

2022

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Technological innovation is almost always investigated from an economic perspective; with few exceptions, the specific technological and social nature of innovation is often ignored. We argue that a novel way to characterise and make sense of different types of technological innovation is to start considering uncertainty. This seems plausible since technological development and innovation almost always occur under conditions of uncertainty. We rely on the distinction between, on the one hand, uncertainty that can be quantified (e.g. probabilistic risk) and, on the other, deep forms of uncertainty that may resist the possibility of being quantified (e.g. severe or fundamental uncertainties). On the basis of these different ingredients of uncertainty in technological innovation, we propose a new taxonomy that reveals the technological nature of innovation. Unlike previous taxonomies employed to handle different types of technological innovations, our taxonomy does not consider the economic value of innovation alone; it is much more oriented towards societal preferences and forms of technological uncertainty. Finally, we investigate the coherence of our proposal with the dual nature of technological artefacts, showing that innovation can be grounded on structural and functional factors and not just on economic ones.

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Section: Varieties Of Technological Innovation: Existing Taxonomiesmentioning

confidence: 97%

Types of Technological Innovation in the Face of Uncertainty

2022

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“…While there is significant philosophical interest in evidence synthesis from deep foundational perspectives [105,106], it is not clear how to deal with significant uncertainties. As we argued in Section 4.2, purely statistical methods are ill-suited for evidence synthesis for drug assessments during a pandemic.…”

Section: The Concept Uncertainty In Evidence Synthesis Of Real World ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Fast Methods for Drug Approval: Research Perspectives for Pandemic Preparedness

Abdin

Pretis

Landes

2023

IJERPH

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Public heath emergencies such as the outbreak of novel infectious diseases represent a major challenge for drug regulatory bodies, practitioners, and scientific communities. In such critical situations drug regulators and public health practitioners base their decisions on evidence generated and synthesised by scientists. The urgency and novelty of the situation create high levels of uncertainty concerning the safety and effectiveness of drugs. One key tool to mitigate such emergencies is pandemic preparedness. There seems to be, however, a lack of scholarly work on methodology for assessments of new or existing drugs during a pandemic. Issues related to risk attitudes, evidence production and evidence synthesis for drug approval require closer attention. This manuscript, therefore, engages in a conceptual analysis of relevant issues of drug assessment during a pandemic. To this end, we rely in our analysis on recent discussions in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of medicine. Important unanswered foundational questions are identified and possible ways to answer them are considered. Similar problems often have similar solutions, hence studying similar situations can provide important clues. We consider drug assessments of orphan drugs and drug assessments during endemics as similar to drug assessment during a pandemic. Furthermore, other scientific fields which cannot carry out controlled experiments may guide the methodology to draw defeasible causal inferences from imperfect data. Future contributions on methodologies for addressing the issues raised here will indeed have great potential to improve pandemic preparedness.

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“…The context of climate tipping points involves cases of high uncertainty as well as cases of deep uncertainty. However, there is no uniform terminology in the literature, see for instance Walker et al (2013), Hansson and Hirsch Hadorn (2016) and Hansson (2022) for various classifications of different types of uncertainties within the framework of decision theory. It should also be noted that the IPCC does not distinguish between high and deep uncertainty (2021, ch.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate tipping points and expert judgment

Lam

Majszak

2022

WIREs Climate Change

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Expert judgment can be seen throughout climate science and even more prominently when discussing climate tipping points. To provide an accurate characterization of expert judgment we begin by evaluating the existing literature on expertise as it relates to climate science as a whole, before then focusing the literature review on the role of expert judgment in the unique context of climate tipping points. From this we turn our attention to the structured expert elicitation protocols specifically developed for producing expert judgments about tipping points. We highlight that expert elicitation is not only used for the quantification of uncertainty in this context, but also for the very identification and characterization of tipping points and their interactions, making expert judgment in itself a genuine scientific output. The central role of expert judgment in this domain raises several epistemic issues that require careful attention. Among other topics, we discuss the relationship between expert judgment and modeling, as well as the nonepistemic values that are involved in the production of expert judgments, highlighting how the elicitation protocols can be used to manage these values. In the perspective of climate change, clarifying the epistemic foundations of expert judgment in this context can help to navigate the epistemic situation between self-defeating alarmism and blind dismissal, thus contributing to a better understanding of the challenges related to climate (and Earth system) tipping points.

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Can Uncertainty Be Quantified?

Cited by 15 publications

References 35 publications

Types of Technological Innovation in the Face of Uncertainty

Types of Technological Innovation in the Face of Uncertainty

Fast Methods for Drug Approval: Research Perspectives for Pandemic Preparedness

Climate tipping points and expert judgment

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