Print PageThe conceptual divides between disciplines in the treatment of risk and uncertainty comes into sharp focus when dealing with thresholds in complex adaptive systems – thresholds that when crossed lead to large, potentially irreversible and usually undesirable changes in the state of the system. As a first step towards eliminating this dissatisfying and unproductive situation we held a series of nine seminars involving ten academic departments (agricultural economics, computer science, ecological and evolutionary biology, mathematics, natural resources, physics, political science, psychology, sociology, and statistics) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln during the 2010 fall semester to learn how scholars in different disciplines understand and employ the concepts of risk, uncertainty and critical thresholds in their research. Groups ranged in size from 7 to 36 with a total of 180 members of the university community participating. Sixteen people then participated in our interactive summary session.
Results/Conclusions
What we heard was a broad, interdisciplinary consensus on the notion of risk; that risk is the probability of an adverse outcome as a consequence of a decision. However, some groups whose expertise is critical in environmental debates regarded risk as an inappropriate topic for research because it represents a value laden term. In contrast with risk, there was no common understanding of uncertainty, with the term often sparking debates within disciplinary discussions. Some disciplines found the concept of critical thresholds valuable while others did not. For those that did, thresholds either featured as boundaries between shifts in system states or as a tipping point for taking action or making a decision.
We think it may be constructive to begin interdisciplinary discussions of environmental indeterminism by focusing on risk because there is a broad shared understanding of the term. Another valuable lesson was that our two step strategy for generating interdisciplinary discussion of difficult topics proved constructive. The initial discussions conducted on the home turf of the departments delved into perspectives rooted in the shared expectations of intellectual standards and rigor stemming from a shared discipline. The concluding interdisciplinary, interactive session enabled the self-selected, highly motivated participants to pursue common concerns in some depth.
