The Cunning of Uncertainty E-Book

Helga Nowotny

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 373

Beschreibung

Uncertainty is interwoven into human existence. It is a powerful incentive in the search for knowledge and an inherent component of scientific research. We have developed many ways of coping with uncertainty. We make promises, manage risks and make predictions to try to clear the mists and predict ahead. But the future is inherently uncertain - and the mist that shrouds our path an inherent part of our journey. The burning question is whether our societies can face up to uncertainty, learn to embrace it and whether we can open up to a constantly evolving future. In this new book, Helga Nowotny shows how research can thrive at the cusp of uncertainty. Science, she argues, can eventually transform uncertainty into certainty, but into certainty which remains always provisional. Uncertainty is never completely static. It is constantly evolving. It encompasses geological time scales and, at the level of human experience, split-second changes as cells divide. Life and death decisions are taken in the blink of the eye, while human interactions with the natural environment may reveal their impact over millennia. Uncertainty is cunning. It appears at unexpected moments, it shuns the straight line, takes the oblique route and sometimes the unexpected short-cut. As we acknowledge the cunning of uncertainty, its threats retreat. We accept that any scientific inquiry must produce results that are provisional and uncertain. This message is vital for politicians and policy-makers: do not be tempted by small, short-term, controllable gains to the exclusion of uncertain, high-gain opportunities. Wide-ranging in its use of examples and enriched by the author's experience as President of the European Research Council, one of the world's leading funding organisations for fundamental research. The Cunning of Uncertainty is a must-read for students and scholars of all disciplines, politicians, policy-makers and anyone concerned with the fundamental role of knowledge and science in our societies today.

Leseprobe

Dedication

For Carlo

Copyright page

Copyright © Helga Nowotny 2016

The right of Helga Nowotny to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2016 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8761-2

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nowotny, Helga.

    The cunning of uncertainty / Helga Nowotny.

        pages cm

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-7456-8761-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 0-7456-8761-X (hardcover : alk. paper)    1.  Prediction (Logic)    2.  Uncertainty.    I.  Title.

    BC181.N69 2015

    121′.63–dc23

2015012740

Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Sabon

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Printed and bound in the UK by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon

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Preface: It Could be Otherwise

This book is about uncertainty, but not only about uncertainty. Uncertainty is inextricably enmeshed with human existence. Even death, our only certainty, is mitigated by the uncertainty of when it will occur. The arrow of time continues to advance the tenuous balance between the punctuated, incomplete and biased knowledge of the past and the uncertainty of what the future will bring.

The future is the ultimate inexhaustible reservoir of uncertainty for the inhabitants of this planet. Notions and imaginaries of the future continue to change. Currently, it appears as fragile and fragmented, as a plural and contradictory mixture of desired and feared imaginations. Ever since modern societies manifested an unprecedented preference for generating novelty, the future became an open horizon with science and technology at the forefront, pushing further into the unknown. Yet what is exciting for some feels threatening to others. Innovation, to use this ubiquitous term, remains a double-edged sword.

Uncertainty is also a powerful incentive in the striving for more knowledge. This includes more effective ways for predicting the future. From the consultation of oracles to the latest charts and graphs as the visualization of the enormous amount of data analytics available today, humans are eager to anticipate what lies ahead. But widening and deepening the knowledge base means more. It enables greater certainty in orientation and practical intervention when confronted with numerous uncertainties. The rise of modern science and technology has led to the vast improvements of material living conditions that provide the potential to lift the remaining parts of the world population out of poverty. Our scientific-technological civilization has developed enormous capabilities to anticipate risks and to focus on uncertainties. But the more we know, the more we also realize what we do not know as yet.

Uncertainty is an inherent component of the process of research. It resides in the multiple ways of searching for and generating new knowledge. Discovery is open-ended and fundamental research cannot predict what it will find or when. Research is the basis of a powerful and systematic process that seeks to transform uncertainties into certainties, only to be confronted with new uncertainties again. Scientific certainties are carefully couched in the precise terms of the conditions under which they hold. Moreover, they are always preliminary. They can and most likely will be replaced by new knowledge, sidestepped by new certainties. Together with curiosity, the lure of uncertainty and of discovering what was not known before is the driving force in this domain of creative human endeavour. If the belief in progress of science and technology and the possibilities for intervention it opens has never waned in the scientific community, this is not always the case in society. The challenge for science to share the sense of intimate involvement in embracing uncertainty with society of which it is a part, so goes my argument, increases together with the capability of science of confronting uncertainty.

At present, the fissure of how to deal, let alone cope, with uncertainty marks the relationship between science and society. While ‘society’, this volatile and hard to grasp assemblage of alternating publics, organized groups in civil society, engaged and dissatisfied citizens and the media, may share some knowledge with experts in making technical judgements, significant differences remain. The line between the prerogative of experts in making technical judgements, including those pertaining to the respective degree of certainty, and the prerogative of non-experts to assess the consequences of those judgements is a fine one to tread (Collins 2014). Between these positions lies the vast range of unintended consequences of human action. It takes us into the realm of complexity in which properties and the behaviour of a system are not determined by its parts, but by their interaction. Seeking to reduce the hidden uncertainties that arise through these interactions will be one of the major tasks ahead. It mutually implicates science and society, as neither can succeed without the other.

Uncertainty is not only embodied and enacted in notions of the future or in the domain of knowledge production. It is a well-known feature of organizational life. Every institution and social organization encounters and needs to cope with uncertainty all the time. In different ways, they are confronted with changes in their environment. They crave for success and efficiency, however defined, and know that they must continue to learn from mistakes and from the ambiguity of their experience. This necessitates adaptation, anticipation, preparedness and even innovation. Depending on their goals and specific organizational forms, available resources, leadership and power relations, institutions seek to reduce uncertainty. They also exploit it for their own purposes and/or accommodate it by a muddling-through approach. These elements overlap and vary.

Uncertainty for institutions, and how to deal with it, comes in different guises. Due to the enduring crisis they unleashed, financial markets have been catapulted into the centre of public scrutiny, outrage and timid attempts at more and tighter regulation. They have been criticized for having been fooled by randomness as they failed to recognize the non-normality of events under their remit. More concretely, they are criticized for having committed the policy error of not distinguishing risk from uncertainty. Thus they largely missed the non-normality that may result in the escalation of uncertainties, leading to potentially catastrophic phase shifts (Haldane 2012). Uncertainties in this peculiar institutional environment offer fascinating glimpses on how simulation models and insights into the dynamics of complex adaptive systems can uncover yet another dimension of the unintended consequences of human action.

One uncertainty that many institutions have to deal with is the uncertainty of future success. This is often intimately tied to people, the human resources of any organization. Initiated by new public management practices, a noticeable trend has been the widespread introduction of quantitative indicators and various kinds of impact assessments. Obviously, this influences the recruitment and selection of people, but also the (re)distribution of responsibility across different levels of hierarchies. As a consequence, uncertainty is shifted elsewhere.

Humanity has made impressive strides in moving from acceptance of what was perceived as fate and the inevitability of destiny towards attempts to shape the human condition in its material, cultural, political, social and organizational dimensions. The various historical trajectories display no lack of arrogance and hubris, of chaotic failures, of overconfidence and the ensuing catastrophes. Yet, once the future became conceived as an open horizon, whatever the weight and burden of path-dependence in history, it provided the possibility of escaping the inevitability of a strict determinism. The future became seen as truly uncertain. From then onwards, to accept reality as it is made it possible to assert that it could have happened otherwise.

Which brings me to the second main theme of this book: the cunning of uncertainty.

The argument presented here is that, in the various manifestations and enactments of uncertainty, the logic of its cunning is at work in the ways we encounter and engage with it. Uncertainty is never completely static but is a process that does not cease to evolve. It encompasses extremely long time­scales and, on the level of human experience, also very short ones. Decisions over life and death may be taken in the blink of the eye, while human interactions with the natural environment may reveal their impact only in geological timescales. The cunning of uncertainty may manifest itself in the choice of the right moment. Timing is also cunning.

Uncertainty is often embedded in situations of ambiguity where it is difficult to disentangle what is known in principle but not in the practice of what is not (yet) known, even if practical action must be taken. The distinction between risk and uncertainty also continues to shift over time. Advances of science and technology in conjunction with novel forms of organization and social innovation transform former uncertainties into risks. Simultaneously, systemic risks that were invisible until now come into sight.

The cunning of uncertainty is a subversive force of reasoning and action. The English word cunning has the same etymological root as the German kennen and können. It is knowledge that combines knowing and crafting. It bears resemblance to the cunning of reason which for the ancient Greeks was embodied in metis. It is seen in action alongside episteme and plays an important role in Homer and in Greek drama. According to Detienne and Vernant, it ‘implies a complex but very coherent body of mental attitudes and intellectual behaviour which combines flair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance, opportunism, various skills and experience acquired over the years. It is applied to situations which are transient, shifting, disconcerting and ambiguous, situations which do not lend themselves to precise measurements, exact calculation or vigorous logic’ (Detienne and Vernant 1978: 3). Einstein and Bacon admitted cunning reason as an integral part of their epistemology and in their interactionist realism (Elkana 1981).

The cunning of uncertainty can be captured by thick descriptions in its many empirical instantiations. It appears at unexpected moments. Its logic shuns the direct line. It indulges in taking the oblique route and occasionally unexpected shortcuts. In science, serendipity − the unexpected finding of something one was not looking for yet whose significance one recognizes − is a highly welcome and recognized form of cunning when wrestling with uncertainty.

In the context of contemporary societies, the cunning of uncertainty may act as a wholesome counterforce to the false certainties induced by hubris and over-reliance on the assumptions that undergird what people think they know. The cunning of uncertainty excels in uncovering the unintended consequences of human purposeful action. It helps to tease out what one is unable to see otherwise when fixing one's gaze on specific goals, even when acting with the best intentions. Experience shows that what has been actually achieved usually differs substantially from what was intended. The cunning of uncertainty courts surprise and invites the unexpected. It upturns routine and is a guide to seeing the potential which has not yet had a real opportunity to unfold and flourish. It excels in luring us to make promises and to believe in promises made by others.

The more the cunning of uncertainty is acknowledged and recognized, so my argument goes, the less the need to feel threatened by uncertainty. The cloak of its presumed inevitability is then revealed to be full of holes. Probabilities take the place of determinism, only to be superseded by the probabilities of probability distributions. The cunning of uncertainty opens new spaces and facilitates alternative options to emerge. Ambiguities permit boundary crossings where closure between knowledge domains or areas of strictly defined expertise reigned before. Ambiguities do not mean that everything becomes fuzzy and porous or that anything goes. They mean acknowledging that social life is full of contradictions and that social beings have the ability to navigate between them. Once they have the necessary resources, they also negotiate with each other viable options for living together.

The last part of my argument rests upon personal experience.

Having spent my professional life studying science as a system and scientists as the main protagonists in a social context which at times appears contradictory and bewildering to them, I remain struck by the different approaches towards uncertainty. In science, a culture of embracing uncertainty reigns, even if many researchers are busy in their daily work routine to solidify knowledge claims and to utilize the certainties so far achieved in specific contexts of application.

In the policy context, the confidence of dealing with uncertainty is put to an often harsh test. Not only are politicians hard to convince to invest in fundamental research whose outcome is highly uncertain as it cannot be predicted. For them, funding short-term projects with economic impact remains the more attractive item on the political agenda. Short-term small gains trump long-term but uncertain high-gain opportunities. Policy advice remains a contested and murky endeavour in the political arena. It is not easy to detect and to fill the rightful place of science. Even if assessments of risks and uncertainty were to converge, consensus on the action to be taken as a consequence most likely will not.

Such fundamental differences in approach were brought home to me during the years spent in helping to establish and operate the European Research Council (ERC), set up in 2007. The European Commission took a radical step in entrusting the setting of the strategy for this new funding institution to a group of independent scientists. Autonomous space was thus created for the best ideas, bottom-up, without setting thematic priorities and committing to scientific excellence only. If science does thrive on the cusp of uncertainty, here was the cusp. It stretched right across all scientific disciplines in a radical openness for the cutting edge of science. It was wholeheartedly committed to promoting outstanding talent, especially among the younger generation. As my colleagues and I soon were to discover, this culture of trust which felt at ease with uncertainty encountered an administrative culture of control with a very low tolerance level for uncertainty. Over time, against many odds and with some difficulties, both sides managed to set up a research funding organization which performs at world-class level. With some cunning, uncertainty, which is inherent in fundamental research, succeeded in carving out a niche in which it can flourish.

Of course, I realize that the preconditions and framings for welcoming uncertainty in science are carefully specified and circumscribed. Every experiment is a process deeply marked by uncertainty. On the one hand, the possible is invited to occur. Somehow on the other hand, what is possible must already have been decided before. Outside the lab, the conditions become even more stringent. Tolerance of uncertainty meets its limits when the stress of materials in buildings or bridges has to be calculated, when air traffic and safety regulations are simulated or the admission of new drugs on the market undergo a series of strictly controlled clinical trials. Safety concerns must override the playful engagement with uncertainty. But in the real world, things can become messy very quickly. Distinctions between acceptable risks and those deemed unacceptable are not easy to make. Legal rules and regulations can lead to a considerable restraint on action and exploration. This is further exacerbated once people begin to worry that they might be sued, leading to institutional inertia and individual anticipatory compliance.

One argument against a more proactive and positive engagement with uncertainty in society is that this is pure luxury, a concern of the elite. As long as people live under conditions of basic insecurity or are thrown back again into it through rising inequalities and an extremely precarious labour market, the accumulation of their economic and social disadvantages sets different priorities for them. While there is some truth to the argument, as security is a fundamental necessity and insecurity must not be confused with uncertainty, research shows that even people living under very precarious economic and social conditions display a considerable amount of social resilience. This is the capacity of groups or societies to bind together in order to sustain and advance their well-being in the face of challenges, including those that arise from the presently dominant economic regime. Social resilience is a dynamic process. Well-being is conditioned by the balance between the life challenges people face and their capabilities for coping with them. They depend on access not only to economic resources, but also to cultural and social resources (Hall and Lamont 2013b: 14). Learning to cope with uncertainty is one of the most precious cultural resources.

This is one more reason why it must be shared and access to it facilitated.

If coping with uncertainty is an important cultural resource, it will be in even greater demand in the future. According to OECD statistics, job profiles are changing and so is the demand for skills. With routine jobs in decline, the demand for non-routine skills goes up. These include the capacity to deal with unexpected situations and uncertainty. The question arises: how good are we in educating young people for uncertainty, while continuing to train them for certainty?

There is a widespread feeling of unease today, triggered by the financial and economic crisis, but also by growing signs of geopolitical instability. This feeling is reinforced by a widespread outlook on the future as fragile and precarious, with climate change harbouring yet more ominous possibilities. The feeling of crisis is always concentrated in the present. In its own momentousness, it signals the non-normality of what is experienced now. Yet, once we are ready to move beyond the tautology of what is to be considered normal, a larger picture emerges. It is populated by black swans and extreme events, by power-laws and non-linear dynamics that arise from interactions we are otherwise unable to detect. It is a picture of deep uncertainty. Yet, at the same time, based on models of biological evolution and of social evolution and resilience, new approaches to cope with risk under conditions of uncertainty emerge.

If we are ready to see the future as a cultural fact, as Arjun Appadurai suggests, the future is something which can be made but also something which is still to be made. As a cultural fact, it is a collective effort, to be built on some kind of shared vision. But it also takes all the cultural resources we can muster. Science and technology have put an amazing amount of such resources at our disposal. They include the modelling of complex adaptive systems and the insights which are to be gained by making visible what otherwise remains invisible: the unintended consequences of human action. Yet whatever resources science and technology have to offer, they are not sufficient if they do not find their way back into the social context.

For the context is and remains society. It is a messy mixture of institutional inertia and over-cautiousness, of vested interests and power structures, of path-dependence including many errors which have been neither acknowledged nor corrected. Yet, in the delicate and tension-ridden relationship between science and society, this is all we have. Democracy is under pressure to re-invent itself and science will soon realize that it is not sufficient to only communicate science. The challenge is to look, think and move beyond the current imperatives of accountability and innovation.

Meanwhile, the cunning of uncertainty is willing to direct those who trust its subversive lead to some of the many situated loci in which uncertainty resides. It is willing to offer cunning access to some of the latest knowledge tools, things to think with and mix with practice. It widens the scope for prediction, while showing the limitations of what can be predicted. As all other knowledge, this is provisional and evolves according to its own dynamic and in an unpredictable way.

It comes with a promise: it could be otherwise.

Acknowledgements

In retrospect, I have been fortunate to encounter the cunning of uncertainty many times at crucial points in my life. It surfaced in some of my professional writings and greeted me in my personal life when I least expected it. But I came to recognize some of its astute ways of working in a more analytical way, mainly during the eight years when I was involved in helping establish the European Research Council (ERC). The many institutional contingencies that were pressed upon my colleagues and myself turned this into a journey from what was neither a necessity nor an impossibility to a reality. I therefore owe much more to my friends and colleagues in the ERC Scientific Council and in the Executive Agency, notably Pablo Amor and Theodore Papazoglou, than they can possibly imagine.

In writing about uncertainty, but never about uncertainty alone, I have enjoyed the hospitality offered by Michael Stampfer, the Executive Director of the Vienna Science and Technology Fund, who continues to host me on its premises. After leaving my function as ERC president, I have benefited from being a guest of the Fondation des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris. During April 2014, Jean-Luc Lory provided me with the secluded, yet highly productive, atmosphere of the Maison Suger necessary for writing. These conditions were also present during a splendid summer in Bonassola on the Ligurian coast.

I want to thank the organizers of three invited lectures who gave me the opportunity to share ideas that were still very much in the making with a highly competent, engaged and curious audience. One was the Sir Karl Popper Memorial Lecture at the London School of Economics in October 2013. The other was the S. T. Lee Lecture at Cambridge University in November 2013. I was also invited to present an inaugural lecture at the Central European University in Budapest in February 2014 whose former president and rector had been the late Yehuda Elkana. Yehuda's wisdom and the unique way in which he combined heart and mind with deep friendship had been with me during a substantial part of my life. I continue to miss him.

I was fortunate to receive detailed and pertinent feedback from close friends, foremost from Giovanni Frazzetto. I remain extremely grateful to him for putting the endearing generosity of his personality, his extraordinary linguistic sensibilities and his knowledge of the life sciences at my disposition by patiently reading, commenting upon and improving the entire manuscript. Stefan Thurner kept me from straying too far from what is and what is not yet known about complex societal systems. My special and very warm thanks go to Marilyn Strathern, whose insightful and generous comments on the draft of the book came at a decisive moment. They were crucial to making loose ends fall into place and helped me considerably to strengthen the argument.

Barbara Blatterer, my long-time personal assistant, accompanied the various phases of the book's gestation with her highly intelligent and consistently meticulous care. My immediate family – Katinka, Eric, Isabel and Gideon – gave me the certainty of being there when I needed them.

The book is dedicated to Carlo Rizzuto, who confronts numerous uncertainties with his great sense of humour and tireless persistence in a country that continues to put obstacles in the way of scientific research. To him I owe the strength to follow my inner compass and to pursue my explorations wherever they may lead.

My deeply felt thanks go to all of them and to those who contributed in other ways to this intellectual and personal journey. At a time when new uncertainties seem overwhelming, I call on the cunning of uncertainty as a guide.

Vienna, January 2015

1Craving for Certainty

Uncertainty in context

Uncertainty is pervasive, written into the script of life. The temporality of human existence prevents the achievement of absolute certainty and the fullness of life mixes events which can be foreseen and are routinely expected with unforeseen elements and surprising turns. This is played out in the unfolding of the individual life course just as much as on the world stage. Uncertainty undergirds the social arrangements of living together, be it in conflict or cooperation. Craving for certainty is only one means of stemming the tide, warding off the feeling of being overwhelmed by something which one cannot yet grasp, let alone control. The craving for certainty exists, irrespective of whether it can be fulfilled, expressed in innumerable ways that attempt to lay our doubts and fears to rest. It is in the productive, ever-changing tension between the two poles of a dynamic spectrum, of being in control and exposed to uncertainty, that personal and collective identities are formed by seeking continuity in defiance of what might happen next. The interplay between overcoming uncertainty and striving for certainty underpins the wish to know in order to be able to influence present and future. It is as old as humanity. It is rooted in the deep-seated desire for security, the material, technological and social protection necessary for survival, comfort and well-being. Knowledge generated when confronted with uncertainty has proven to be the most powerful means developed in our cultural evolutionary trajectory so far to assure survival and striving for continuous improvements in material living standards and well-being. The capacity for generating knowledge and how to use it needs to be widely shared by assuring access through education and research if the challenges of future uncertainties are to be met.

Western capitalistic societies owe much of the living standards they enjoy to the systematic attempt to reduce existential insecurity. Their belief in technical progress and continuous improvement is rooted in the values of the Enlightenment which opened the legitimate space for the libido scientiae, the desire to know, and made room for practical experimentation across a wide range of activities (Mokyr 2009). Political, legal, economic and cultural structural arrangements were accompanied by strong beliefs in the universalism of reason, manifest in scientific positivism. Rationality and reason were championed as the signposts to safeguard and assure a double-anchored future. One route was through the epistemological foundations of the certainty of knowledge gained through experimentation and proof. The other route was through the practical applications of the new knowledge which were the result of such efforts. From the Baconian project to Diderot's Encyclopedia, an impressive array of transformations of knowledge into practice followed, which in turn led to new knowledge in the useful arts and inventions. As a result, the security and comfort of daily life were enhanced and an impressive infrastructure for the increase of material wealth and vastly improved health conditions emerged. Among them, the amazing gains in longevity stand out. Seen through a worldwide statistical lens today, never before did such a large part of humanity have the chance to live healthily into old age, whose onset and termination continue to be extended. The improvements in health and life expectancy reach even those countries in which, admittedly, still much more needs to be done. This is one of the dreams of the Enlightenment that has materialized, even if new challenges come with it.

Historical flashbacks risk either falling into a heroic narrative or construing vastly exaggerated discontinuities. Looking back to the values and beliefs of the Enlightenment, the late Yehuda Elkana never tired of inviting me and others to ‘rethink’ it. We should accept the fact that all knowledge – and this includes knowledge about uncertainties − is situated in a specific historical and social context. This is key to discovering the origins of knowledge, enriching and relevant as it is to understand their conceptual power and reach. It also holds for assessing the validity and reliability of knowledge. The pertinent question of whether knowledge can and will contribute towards a solution for a problem at hand is intimately connected with contextualizing it, a lesson which many policy makers often learn the hard way. Rethinking the Enlightenment entails an epistemological shift from a ‘local universalism’ to a ‘global contextualism’ (Elkana and Klöpper 2012). What this means is we must leave behind the assumption of Enlightenment belief in the universalism of reason. With the benefit of hindsight, this presumed universalism turns out to be a historically situated, local form of knowledge. It was sufficiently powerful to succeed in generalizing itself as a universal norm. Historians of science and other scholars have amply demonstrated that local knowledge elements enter in multiple ways. Whatever is presented today as universal in a globalized world has a local flavour to it which needs to be contextualized. Epistemologically speaking, it follows that we ought to move towards a global contextualism, in which the variety of contexts is given its epistemological as well as its practical due by recognizing the historical, cultural, political and social specificities and differences of diverse forms of knowledge.

Such a rethinking matters when it comes to putting uncertainty, and the attempts to cope with and overcome it, into context. Just as one can no longer speak of one modernity, but has to acknowledge that there are multiple modernities, each emerging from and producing its own specific preconditions and meanings, putting uncertainty into context reveals a colourful mix of ambiguities and contradictions. The tensions that become visible need to be made explicit and so do the different meanings attached to uncertainty. Speaking about uncertainty and analysing the various ways of coping with it therefore always has to put uncertainty into context.

So, why the theme of uncertainty and why now? On a superficial level, at least part of the western world seems to have entered a phase in which uncertainty as an enduring feature of life is losing the allure of being mainly a carrier of opportunities. As the collective mood swings, not for the first time, uncertainty becomes associated with threat. Vague at first, it is linked to the anticipation of deterioration, or even decline, yet to come. Again, at a superficial level, one can hypothesize that the glorious decades of material plenty are definitely over. The financial markets with their excessive hubris have triggered a lasting economic crisis with global repercussions which exacerbate the widening income gap that had started to develop a long time ago. The split between the ‘real’ economy and the virtual one generated by and within financial markets is bound to lead to even greater volatility. Some major shake-up appears to be unavoidable and the spectre of social unrest looms on the horizon. These perceptions are framed and seem to be corroborated by major geopolitical shifts under way.

Seen in historical perspective, such moments of crisis are nothing new. They are part of cyclical movements that have been attributed to being an integral part of how capitalism works. One might object that this time it is no longer western-dominated capitalism alone, but the different varieties of global/local capitalisms that intersect and overlap, thereby aggravating the uncertainty they induce. Moreover, the perception of crisis in a general climate of uncertainty clouding the future horizon is bound to be very different among the members of the global elites than it is among the swelling ranks of younger people that now populate the new precariat. The middle class is said to be squeezed out. All these differences in context will have an impact on the meaning that uncertainty is given. It also affects the resources that people have at their disposal as to how they cope with the uncertainty they encounter and the strategies they can muster to feed their future aspirations. Obviously, the present notion of the future is undergoing yet another change, just as it has repeatedly in the past. At present, the future appears volatile and fragile. It has lost much of the coherence which held it together, at least seen in retrospect. Our present notion of the future has become a highly fragmented one.

Despite such and other musings of the Zeitgeist and the admittedly always momentous concentration of the perception of uncertainty in the present, even if it is pregnant with imaginations of the future, there is one remarkable continuity in how the future is perceived, approached and imagined. It thrives in a special contextual niche of uncertainty. It is the institutionalized and immensely powerful form in which the systematic production of new knowledge has found its home: science and technology. While the origins of modern science lie in Europe and the question of why in Europe is still debated among historians, it continues to spread unevenly ever since from a centre occupied by Europe, North America and Japan to a globally dispersed periphery. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, this extension has gained rapid momentum, with science and technology becoming a truly global phenomenon. For the first time, China's R&D intensity, which is considered the traceable marker of scientific and technological activities in economic terms, overtook the EU-28 in 2012. Estimates about future funding closely follow the prognostication of economic prowess of the two major economic superpowers. By 2022, both China and the USA are projected to spend €480 billion annually on research and development (Battelle 2014).

Such figures make it clear that governments consider science and technology the driving forces of economic growth. At the same time, they conceal the power that is inherent in curiosity when it pushes the boundaries of what is already known into the territory of the unknown. Faced with the enormous realm of what is not yet known, but eventually will be known, scientific curiosity continues the quest to discover and transform what it finds into a consolidated, yet open, flexible and always provisional body of knowledge. The process of knowledge production itself is inherently uncertain, although striving to ascertain new certainties. Moreover, every bit of newly produced knowledge − the procedures and methods through which it is gained, the instruments and research infrastructures that underpin it, the mathematics and other tools that help to acquire it – all lead to a vast number of new questions to ask about interconnections and mechanisms, about the regulation of mechanisms and how these insights can be usefully put into further practice and lead to further new research. This barely touches upon the next big challenge, namely how to bring society into science and let it take part, not only as consumers or presumed beneficiaries, but as producers of knowledge in the process of research itself.

The uncertainty of the research process is confronted by the inquisitive and curious mind of the individual researcher, but also shared as an institutionalized collective endeavour by the system of science. Research councils and other funding agencies, recruitment and promotion committees in universities, and various policy-making bodies have developed coping strategies for dealing with uncertainty, even if uncertainty comes in different guises for them. Under increasing pressure from governments, improving links with business and industry has become a policy priority which carries its own specific uncertainties. Contextualizing uncertainty reveals different meanings and allows for different questions to be asked. Why do research at all? Which kind and who sets the priorities? What about current career prospects? Who identifies talent and how? Which are the rewards and how can we sustain them? Throughout this highly structured and efficient system in pursuit of the generation of new knowledge, uncertainty is pervasive. In the lab and during the research process, the question is simply: does it work? However small the results, are they potential stepping stones for larger leading questions? Science is one of the few institutions with a genuine long-term vision. It is to extend scientific understanding of the world further into the unknown. To use the old but still valid metaphor, every member of the scientific community stands on the shoulders of giants in order to see further, in greater depth and with better understanding of the complexity of the revealed interconnections. Science as a system has to assure the optimal conditions for this to happen.

As a shared and highly interactive practice, research is never done for its own sake only. Societal expectations are too big and all-embracing, interwoven with government priorities and policies that effect modes of financing in increasingly tighter and more sophisticated ways. The transformation of uncertainties into certain knowledge, even if always only provisional, is followed by putting knowledge to practical use, once it has been certified by scientific peers. Research is about manipulation and intervention, not only in the lab, but it is expected even more to effect changes in the real world once it leaves the lab: to build bridges or the latest generation of military weaponry; to develop new GMOs or more environmentally friendly fertilizers; to develop a new vaccine in order to halt the next global epidemic; to provide continuously updated and sophisticated software for cyber-security; followed by a host of other uses without which modern life would be unthinkable. Nor are the social sciences exempt from expectations to provide knowledge which is deemed adequate to mitigate specified social problems and come up with solutions to what is to be done about them. Only the humanities believe – still – that they can escape the expectation of societal impact and so-called relevance, insisting on their intellectual significance and critical stance (Volkswagenstiftung 2014).

Paradoxically, the tighter coupling of impact expectations with the higher degree of certainty that knowledge is expected to have in order to meet the target leads to new uncertainties. Uncertainty switches gestalt. It shifts elsewhere. The uncertainty inherent in the research process that teases, excites and challenges the researcher to follow where it leads persists in a productive way. But following the arduous process of transforming scientific uncertainty into certainty is no longer sufficient. With governments and funding agencies increasingly insisting on ex ante assurances on what they will receive in return for (their) taxpayers' money, uncertainty is displaced. It now resides in the many intractable processes that may, but need not, lead to the desired or promised impact and outcomes. Will it unleash the desired innovation and do so sufficiently fast to be ahead of one's competitors? Will policy advice be taken up or remain inconsequentially on the sidelines? The future of the stipulated impact, which seemed so near and which has officially been marked by milestones with deadlines and deliveries with measurable outcomes, is by no means given. As Bertrand de Jouvenel had observed in 1967, knowledge of potential outcomes of future-creating actions is inescapably uncertain and hence ‘a contradiction in terms’. He suggests that we need to understand ‘emerging situations’ while they are still in flux, and therefore subject to influence before they become facts. A society's capacity for innovative change must be appreciated as ‘our knowledge of the future is inversely proportional to the rate of progress’. In the context of accelerating innovation, this implies that knowledge of the future is progressively moved closer to the present, while long-term futures recede ever further (Jouvenel 1967: 257; quoted in Adam and Groves 2007: 32−3).