La borrosa distinción riesgo-incertidumbre

Abstract

This paper is part of a wider research concerning problems associated to risk. The research results are framed within the problem of the polysemy of words representing concepts such as uncertainty, risk and probability.Three approaches that turn the risk-uncertainty distinction hard to be resolved are presented. The firs approach is the lack of differentiation between risk and uncertainty which is a characteristic of those here called social scientists. The second one is defining risk as a category of uncertainty and which proposes several degrees of uncertainty. And the third approach, which is the one supported here, is the discrimination between uncertainty and risk. U nlike the second approach, we propase a concept of risk that is built from the risk as a knowledge degree. As the risk is associated with the concept ofprobability, a concept ofrisk closer to the so-called belief degrees will be shown, not as probabilities but as "likelihoods".