Monday, May 31, 2010
Colloquium: The status of risk: an attempt of clarification
Celine Kermisch, Chargée de recherches du FNRS, Fondation Wiener-Anspach, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, Monday 31st May 2010, room a1.270, TPM building, TU Delft.
This talk intends to show that the question of the status of risk cannot be reduced to the classical opposition between quantified risk and constructed risk. A review of the literature highlights a much more complex picture. The analysis of realistic, representational—with its epistemological variants—and hybrid conceptions of risk, as well as the analysis of the different types of relationships between risk and danger reveal that risk can be conceived as a representational category, which transcends the quantified/constructed opposition. Indeed, the concept of risk integrates a value-laden component as well as a quantified component and can be formalized as R = f (X1, X2, ∑ Xn), where Xi are the different variables that have to be taken into account and n is the number of these variables. One of these dimensions being the quantification of the potential damage, while other dimensions reflect social, psychological, political or moral values.
