Knowledge, Uncertainty, and Ignorance Around Health Risks

This chapter examines how continuously extending evidence about risks is produced, circulated, and received in society. The capacity to calculate odds has been socially valued since it offers a framework promoting social order and a contract for living together which would seem a priori favorable to all. However, across a range of health risks, including lifestyles, genetic or cancer screening, exposure to environmental threats, and infectious diseases, the authority of formal risk knowledge is recurrently challenged. In addition to the difficulties reported by people who have to make decisions based on predicted risks, the logic of risk continues to expand the scope of possible actions. I consider that as a consequence, opportunities for conflicts across contrasted views about the best way to protect health increase. In addition, social influences affecting the production and circulation of knowledge, or its manipulation to serve specific interests, reveal that multiple filters take place between risk knowledge and measures advocated to protect individual and public health. With this chapter, I intend to show how, in recent decades, the proliferation of risk has contributed to transforming the relationships between science and society.