Competing Conceptions of Risk, Paul Thompson and Wesley Dean, Texas A&M

Bradbury, Shrader-Frechette and Hornig offer dichotomous schemes for classifying opposing views but overstate and misidentify the points of contention. The debate between probabilists and contextualists is a debate over how to understand risk, and both ar

Risk probabilism and risk contextualism represent the opposite ends of a continuum for conceptualizing risk. Scientists and scholars who study risk and risk issues will likely adopt conceptions of risk that fall somewhere along the axis between extreme pr

Previous slide

Next slide

Back to first slide

View graphic version

While our utilitarian definitions suffice in most instances we can find plenty of wordy, elaborate and sometimes obtuse views by those who spend far more time mired in the topic than we do.