Informal logics of risk: contingency and modes of practical reasoning

Abstract

Discussions about the rationality or irrationality displayed by actors with regard to risk often assume an implicit canonical conception of reason. However, when actors engage with the practicalities of risk issues, in their specific contexts, a diversity of informal modes of reasoning may be seen to inform their actions. This paper argues that such reasoning practices, rather than constituting anomalous exceptions to mainstream theoretical accounts of risk phenomena, need to be recognized as an important topic for investigation in their own right. Indeed, examining this sphere of interaction patterns seems to shed light on mechanisms that generate the distinctive characteristics of risk issues in human experience. The growth in importance of the technical discourse of risk in professional practice creates an increasing number of situations where the micro‐politics of contingency overlaps with formal audit controls, so raising important questions about the character of risk reasoning by experts and lay people alike.

Keywords:

• risk contingency
• rationality
• practical reasoning
• micro‐politics
• sense‐making
• expertise

Acknowledgements

&SetFont Typeface="3";Earlier versions of this paper have been presented to a number of conference and seminar audiences, including Sociolinguistics Symposium 14 in Gent in April 2002 and the Society for Risk Analysis World Risk Congress in Brussels, in June 2003. The paper draws on several recent research projects, including work supported by the Economic & Social Research Council (awards L211252044 and L211272006), the European Commission (contract ENV4‐CT96‐0265), and the BP/CARR Complex Risk Programme. I am pleased to acknowledge the collaboration of Ion Georgiou, Ragnar Löfstedt, Nick Pidgeon, Jerry Ravetz, Jonathan Rosenhead, and the late Jonathan Sime in the collection and discussion of the data I have used. Conversations with Mick Bloor, Chris Candlin, Srikant Sarangi and John Walls proved invaluable in shaping my thoughts on these matters. Mick Bloor kindly provided detailed comments on an earlier version of the text. I am also grateful to the referees for their penetrating observations. Support during the preparation of the paper was provided in part by the Leverhulme Trust (via the Understanding Risk programme).

Notes

Implicit in Tait’s interests/values scheme is a fact/value (is/ought) distinction that, historically, has proved problematic for social theory (see e.g. Davydova and Sharrock, 2003). In this paper I pursue Schutz’s (1962, p. 1964) general approach to addressing this difficulty, namely by focusing my attention on social action and the nature of risk‐related rationality.

Whilst recognizing the important contribution of other approaches to understanding individual deviations from canonical rationality, for example the psychological or psychoanalytical literatures concerned with cognitive distortions in perception (e.g. Kahneman et al., 1982) or unconscious subjective associations and connotations (e.g. Freud [1901], 2002; Phillips, 1995), respectively, I am primarily interested here in the processes by which diverse social logics are generated through interaction. In this paper, I draw, in particular, on the literatures of social phenomenology (Schutz, 1962, 1964; Bloor, 1995), (symbolic) interactionism (Atkinson and Housley, 2003; Blumer, 1969), ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967; Mehan and Wood, 1975; Handel, 1982) and sociolinguistics (Candlin and Candlin, 2002; Sarangi and Candlin, 2003).