Uncertainty and Its Management

Abstract

Uncertainty has always been a factor in public affairs. The application of science to reduce this uncertainty extends back at least as far as the state astrology practiced by the Babylonians. They carefully kept records of good and bad natural events, arid attempted to establish inductive generalizations of their correlation with celestial phenomena. Thereby they hoped to ascertain the judgements of their gods on their activities. With the development of the modern scientific world-view, causality was conceived as impersonal, and uncertainty came to be analyzed in terms of regularly recurring events. Out of this shift came our current ideas of ‘probability’ in the seventeenth century. Since then the techniques of statistics have developed continuously, enabling an effective management of uncertainty over an increasing range of problems.