Indicators of uncertainty in chemical risk assessments

Quality in environmental science for policy: Assessing uncertainty as a component of policy analysis

“…Linguistic typologies of uncertainty refer to the relationship between the properties of the message emitted and those of the message received. Levin et al (2004) classify linguistic uncertainty as: uncertainty in content (leading to inexact propositional content), epistemic (the degree of belief assigned to a proposition), conditional (the truth of one statement is conditional on the trust in another), and inferential (logical inference). Maxim and Van der Sluijs (2007) distinguished several forms of linguistic uncertainty within a communication itself: lack of reliability (selective use of references from the available scientific knowledge), lack of robustness (ignoring criticism), ignorance of knowledge produced by other stakeholders, lack of relevance of the arguments to the issue under debate, logical circularity of the discourse, and lack of legitimacy of the sources of information used.…”

Safety is more than the antonym of risk

“…Procedures for expressing and reporting uncertainties are much less developed than the corresponding procedures for probabilities. 34 However, the aim should be analogous to that of probability estimates, namely to obtain the best possible judgment that the community of experts can make on the extent and nature of the uncertainties involved. Objective knowledge about uncertainties is at least as difficult to obtain as objective knowledge about probabilities.…”

Adequacy Conditions for Reporting Uncertainty in Chemical Risk Assessments

“…(For discussions of problems associated with numerical vs. verbal probability expressions, see for instance Mosteller and Youtz 1990;Wallsten et al 1993;Budescu and Wallsten 1995;Teigen and Brun 2000. ) In current practice in risk assessment, a wide variety of ordinary language phrases, whose use and interpretation are far from clear, are used to express degrees of belief and doubt in risk assessments (Levin et al 2004). Hence, if verbal phrases are to be used in confidence assignments, the problem of their interpretation needs to be addressed.…”

“…However, because linguistic inexactness may give rise to uncertainty in the audience of the risk assessment, this aspect of clarity, I believe, needs more emphasis. That risk assessment reports are not free from unnecessarily inexact words and phrases with a potential of creating uncertainty is shown by Levin et al (2004). Therefore, risk assessors need to anticipate possible unintended interpretations of their statements, and make use of the possibility of defining not only technical terms, as the USEPA recommends, but also non-technical ones that are used in specific senses.…”