Where else for an academic to begin learning about something new (to her) than trying to understand how others have organized related concepts?

Lots of smart people have thought hard about uncertainty; this post covers some of my initial thoughts on beginning to catch up with them.

In fact, various ways of categorizing uncertainty have been developed by thinkers in different fields of inquiry, which complicates communication because ‘uncertainty’ and related words and concepts (such as ‘risk’) have different meanings to different people in different contexts.

My thinking right now is that’s it’s probably helpful for me to use ‘uncertainty’ as an umbrella term, and follow others in distinguishing three major components of scientific uncertainty:

• Measurement error: the limited precision and/or accuracy of a method
• Indeterminacy: the limited ability to know the parameters and interactions of all relevant components in a complex system (the known unknowns*)
• Ignorance: the unknown unknowns*

*credit to Donald Rumsfeld for his rather poetic description of two of these three:  https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Donald_Rumsfeld

The extent to which each of these components affects overall uncertainty varies in different fields and research topics, as does how they are managed by assumptions (explicit or not) and standards of practice in each field. Just another thing that makes the communication of uncertainty challenging. Which of these is most interesting or important to you?

What I’ve posted here was gleaned from several resources; I plan in later posts to come back to both these topics and those resources in greater detail. But one good place to start is:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty