Concept
Uncertainty
Overview
Uncertainty or incertitude refers to situations involving imperfect or unknown information. It applies to predictions of future events, to physical measurements that are already made, or to the unknown, and is particularly relevant for decision-making. Uncertainty arises in partially observable or stochastic or complex or dynamic environments, as well as due to ignorance, indolence, or both. It arises in any number of fields, including insurance, philosophy, physics, statistics, economics, entrepreneurship, finance, medicine, psychology, sociology, engineering, metrology, meteorology, ecology and information science.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Uncertainty is discussed.
With the development of empirical research, uncertainty or contingency is no longer regarded as infecting in a wholesale way an entire region, discrediting it save as it can be brought under the protecting aegis of universal truths as major premises. Uncertainty is now a matter of detail. It is the question whether the particular fact is really what it has been taken to be.
John Dewey, Essays in Experimental Logic
states what it is; names the idea; opens on it
Uncertainty is, indeed, in one respect, as nearly allied to hope as to fear, since it makes an essential part in the composition of the former passion; but the reason why it inclines not to that side, is, that uncertainty alone is uneasy, and has a relation of impressions to the uneasy passions. 'Tis thus our uncertainty concerning any minute circumstance relating to a person, increases our apprehensions of his…
David Hume, Philosophical Works, v. 2
names the idea; states what it is; opens on it
Whether or not indeterminateness, uncertainty, actually exists in the world is a difficult question. It is easier to think of the world as fixed, settled once for all, and man as accumulating all the uncertainty there is in his will and all the doubt there is in his intellect.
John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct
states what it is; names the idea; opens on it
In weighing the future against the present, the uncertainty of all things future is a leading element; and that uncertainty is of very different degrees. “All circumstances,” therefore, “increasing the probability of the provision we make for futurity being enjoyed by ourselves or others, tend” justly and reasonably “to give strength to the effective desire of…
John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy
states what it is; names the idea; opens on it
This is an element of uncertainty which enters largely into all our predictions of effects; but it is not peculiarly applicable to the Method of Concomitant Variations. The uncertainty, however, of which I am about to speak, is characteristic of that method; especially in the cases in which the extreme limits of our observation are very narrow, in comparison with the possible variations in the quantities of the…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
names the idea; opens on it
Philosophers who discussed Uncertainty
Related ideas
- Hellenistic philosophy
- Pyrrhonism
- Hamlet
- Philosophy
- Western philosophy
- Pyrrho
- Sociology
- Game
- Medicine
- Information
- Meteorology
- Philosophical skepticism
- Psychology
- Probability
- Physics
- Probability theory
- Risk
- Quantum mechanics
- Academic skepticism
- Statistics
- Ignorance
- Uncertainty principle
- Vagueness
- Acatalepsy
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Ecological economics.