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1 Meta-Theoretical Foundations What, then, is time? If nobody asks me, I know. But if I try to explain it to one who asks me, I don’t know. — Saint Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions of St. Augustine (1963) S ince our goal is to provide a logically grounded basis for effective forms of risk governance, our first task is to identify and disambiguate key disagreements about the meaning of risk itself. Once that is done, the next task is to demarcate the logical status of risk itself from the status of our knowledge about risk; the two are not the same. Then, we need to establish certain first principles for demarcating different levels of knowledge certainty about risks. Those tasks completed, we will be in a position to lay out the connections between our understanding of risk—including a large input from science— and appropriate governance structures and procedures for managing risks—­ including such grand risks as global climate change. What Saint Augustine says about time in the epigraph can also be said about risk—even more so. Risk and time are universal human characteristics, a species-shared experience. Fundamental features of the human experience, like these, are often the most elusive to logical rigor. The issue is much more than just a definitional challenge; it goes to the core question of whether risk exists, and if they do, under what conditions. It raises the question of how do we come to recognize and give meaning to risk. It conditions the choices humans have about how to deal with the risks they face. At rock bottom, these are questions about a state of the world of growing importance and how humans interpret and react to that state. Large portions of this chapter are drawn from Rosa 1998a, 1998b, 2008 and from Rosa and Clarke 2012. 14 Social Science Foundations of Risk Epistemological Debates What is the state of the world in the context of risk?1 This question opens a window on a major epistemological debate in the risk field: is risk an objective state of the world or merely a social process that produces a collective judgment (social construction)? A simplified way to look at the problem is to compare two contradictory meta-theoretical presuppositions.2 1. There is a world independent of human understanding of it. 2. The world exists in large part because of human understanding of it. We can think of the first presupposition as “mind-independent” (Boghossian 2006) and the second as “observer-relevant” (Searle 1995). The first claim summarizes the realist position, while the second summarizes the postmodern and social constructivist position. As for risk, the question becomes: is risk a state of the world or a state of the world as we see it? Is seeing believing, or is believing seeing? The logical point here is there cannot be a world that is both independent of our understanding of it but also, simultaneously, dependent on understanding it, although we will see later that a variety of theoretical orientations embed this very contradiction into their conceptualizations. There are good reasons to be concerned about such pivotal presuppositions. They become master frames for how we apprehend, reflect on, and explain the world. Logicians have long told us that systems of ideas containing a fundamental contradiction can be used to deduce any conclusion whatsoever, no matter how absurd. Perhaps more important than such insurmountable logical challenges are the political consequences of this line of reasoning. Not only can contradiction vitiate the logic of our knowledge claims, and not only can it lead to incoherence in principles of governance, but also, more dangerous, it can open a large window for political abuse. It allows the powerful and unscrupulous to adopt just about any terminology—risk or otherwise—to impose their will on others with impunity.3 The first claim, the realist one, is underpinned by a wide variety of indisputable human experiences. Some things are universally and indisputably ac1 . We define “state of the world” as it applies to humans as a set of environmental and social forces at a given point in time and place that conditions available choices. The states of water provide a useful parallel in the physical world. Water’s various states (liquid, solid, gas) are determined by the volume of molecules in motion (heat), which in turn condition the use to be made of that form—whether to drink, cool a drink, or humidify a room. 2. Regardless of the...

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