Usable Knowledge, Usable Ignorance: Incomplete Science with Policy Implications
Abstract
Despite all our research, a truthful response to questions such as "What's going to happen to the biosphere? " will most often be "We don't know, and we won't know." We go on to explore how, in the face of overwhelming ignorance, scientific inquiries in policy-related contexts can most responsibly and effectively be conducted. Better procedures for self- criticism and quality control in science are argued to be central to the construction of "usable ignorance. "A key role is also assigned to the design of approaches through which incomplete science can be better integrated into policy debates.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
The development process of the algorithm cannot be perfect in this setting.
“Hence, the development process of the algorithm cannot be perfect in this setting, one has to be open to negotiation and unavoidably work with imperfections and clumsiness (Ravetz, 1987).”
From Ethical principles in machine learning and artificial intelligence: cases from the field and possible ways forward (2020) · cites this paper as Ravetz, 1987
The citation lists haven’t been fetched yet
References 17 · Cited by 185
- Authors
- Ravetz, J. R.
- Affiliations
- University of Leeds (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Ravetz, Jerome R.
- Venue
- Knowledge
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 1987-09
- Volume
- 9
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 87-116
- ISSN
- 0164-0259 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2168911882
- Cited by
- 185
- References
- 17
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 2 · 2021: 8 · 2020: 10 · 2019: 7 · 2018: 7 · 2017: 6 · 2016: 9 · 2015: 3 · 2014: 11 · 2013: 8 · 2012: 7
- FWCI
- 39.94
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Science Communication (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Information Systems and Management › Research, Science, and Academia
- Social Sciences › General Social Sciences › Social Science and Policy Research
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law › Conservation, Ecology, Wildlife Education
- Keywords
- scientific uncertainty, science-policy interface, biosphere, policy decision-making
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
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