The geography of epistemic risk

Abstract

At each stage of inquiry, actions, choices, and judgments carry with them a chance that they will lead to mistakes and false conclusions. One of the most vigorously discussed kinds of epistemic risk is inductive risk-that is, the risk of inferring a false positive or a false negative from statistical evidence. This chapter develops a more fine-grained typology of epistemic risks and argues that many of the epistemic risks that have been classified as inductive risks are actually better seen as examples of a more expansive category, which this paper dubs "phronetic risk." This more fine-grained typology helps to show that values in science often operate not exclusively at the level of individual psychologies but also at the level of knowledge-generating social institutions.