Abstract

CHAVARRO, Luis Alfonso. Risk and uncertainty as characteristics of current society: ideas, perceptions and representations. Reflexiones [online]. 2018, vol.97, n.1, pp.65-75. ISSN 1659-2859.  http://dx.doi.org/10.15517/rr.v97i1.31509.

In current societies characterized by scientific and technological development, a sense of uncertainty is experienced in the face of events considered as collateral effects, a result precisely of the success of such development. The conceptualization of these events has been carried out from sociology by authors like Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Niklas Luhmann, among others, and from its particular approaches, risk becomes a key category to define the current society. In the present work, the contributions of these authors are articulated to try to understand how this category can be evaluated assuming it as an effective idea to understand the present society and the problems of insecurity, lack of confidence and uncertainty that appear today, and that they put of present a crisis of the scientific truth of the experts in the explanation of the new evils of the progress. Equally, it is not enough to consider the risk and its perception among the population as an error that evidences a cognitive deficit of the individuals, but in understanding that before the crisis of the truth of the experts, the difference between real risk and perceived tends to diminish, and with this arise new conflicts between communities whose cohesion is basically due to solidarity with dangers common to humanity, which allows us to think of risk as a new axial principle of modern society in a situation of modernity reflective.

Keywords : Collateral effects; Reflective modernity; Uncertain risk; Ontological security; Laypersons; Experts.

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