In the context of risk analysis and decision analysis, uncertainty is usually formulated using probability, although occasionally something like fuzzy arithmetic will be used.

Empirical quantities used as input for risk and decision analysis may have uncertainty arising from many sources. Here are a few, as categorized by M. Granger Morgan and Max Henrion1:

The importance of this list is that different types of uncertainty need to be recognized and treated in different ways. For example, statistical variation is usually described with a probability distribution. Variability, however, may entail a probability distribution of another probability distribution, which becomes messy quickly.

1Morgan, M. Granger, and Henrion, Max. Uncertainty: A Guide to Dealing with Uncertainty in Quantitative Risk and Policay Analysis, Cambridge University Press, 1990.

The harmony of sound and stillness holds no beauty, for me.
I lack even terror, in this wasted expanse of existence.
Where once I feared emptiness, now I don't even have that comfort.
"I think, I am."
I am, but I cannot think. Even "I" slips away: all that remains is is. No longer tense, I is limp being.

What is happiness? Happiness is fulfillment. Filling what? I? And even emptiness cannot exist without walls, ceiling, floor.
Questions slip merrily away. My attention gorges.

Fingernails gaze back, monotonous. The steady rhythme of their nothingness syncopates softly to the comforting chirp of crickets.
What do these frayed pilgrims,
These fleshless guardians,
What do they have to do with my body?
Please?

Un*cer"tain*ty (?), n.; pl. Uncertainties ().

1.

The quality or state of being uncertain.

2.

That which is uncertain; something unknown.

Our shepherd's case is every man's case that quits a moral certainty for an uncertainty. L'Estrange.

 

© Webster 1913.

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