Acknowledging Uncertainty Rethinking Rhetoric in a Hazardous Environment

The uncertainty of risk analysis—the fact that the data do not provide unique answers—allows for a range of perceptions about the nature of chemical hazards and their effects on worker health.. . . Some place concerns about risk within a calculus of economic viednlity others see risk from the point of view of those exposed to hazards. Each view has implications for responsibility and control.  

And we debate about things that seem to be capable of admitting two possibilities for no one debates things incapable of being different in past or fiture or present, at least not if they suppose that to be the case for there is nodring more [to say].  

From its beginnings in classical theory, rhetoric has been concerned with questions of probability, for, as Aristotle said, we do not argue about things that are certain. Conceived as a theory of public discourse, rhetoric was defined as an inventional art—an art devoted to the study of a method to find out the available means of persuasion. In simple terms, rhetoric distinguished Itself from analytic methods (dialectic) that promised to probe the truth of propositions through rigorous logical method. Instead, rhetoric provided the- 

The most fundamental of statistical questions—what is the strength of the evidence. —is related to the fundamental yet most uncertain of scientific question—how do we explain what we observe  

This fundamental problem—how to interpret and learn from data in the face of gaps in our substantive knowledge—bedevils all technological approaches to the problem of quantitative reasoning.  

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Acknowledging Uncertainty Rethinking Rhetoric in a Hazardous Environment... 

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