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Safety is ensured when hazardous circumstances, their consequences and their controls are known. How then, in uncertain contexts can safety be defined and achieved? Uncertainty raises new questions and needs new approaches for dealing with safety. These are introduced in the first chapter and developed throughout the book.

The concept of uncertainty is difficult to comprehend, even when we restrict our focus to safety science. In a world with various scientific philosophical stances, “uncertainty” is debated in various contexts. However, in an effort to go deeper into a more basic understanding of uncertainty our knowledge is quickly challenged. What exists? How do we know what exists? What can we know about it? Aiming these questions at uncertainty reveals that interpreting uncertainty as existing in any ontological sense is difficult to defend. Does this imply that uncertainty can only be understood in an epistemological sense or merely as a construct? Epistemological understandings of uncertainty encompass, in principle, the whole rationality spectrum from relativism to positivism, thus not excluding any form of analyses or understanding of uncertainty. However, we recognize the need for an increased understanding of which elements the uncertainty concept comprises, and possible consequences of an unreflective discarding of elements. Within the framework of a linear time concept consisting of the past, the present and not least the future, we claim that uncertainty’s ontological status exists on various levels. In the present uncertainty is a purely epistemological category, and in the past uncertainty has its meaning related to what has been observed, recognized and comprehended, thus a methodological challenge. In the futuristic perspective uncertainty exists and cannot be reduced.

This chapter presents and discusses some recent advances in the risk field, linked to the conceptualisation of risk and specifically addressing unforeseen events, surprises and so-called black swans. It shows how the traditional probability-based perspectives on risk are extended to broader ways of thinking about risk, which give due attention to the uncertainties and also draw on ideas from the quality discourse and organisational learning (collective mindfulness and its five principles: preoccupation with failure, reluctance to simplify, sensitivity to operations, commitment to resilience and deference to expertise). The main aims of the chapter are to point to this thinking and provide some reflections on how to use it for further developing the risk assessment and risk management fields.

In the prevailing safety management paradigm, uncertainty is the enemy, and we seek to eradicate it through anticipation and predetermination. But this strategy generates “robust yet brittle” systems, unable to handle disturbances outside their envelope of designed-for contingencies. A paradigm shift is needed. We are immersed in uncertainty. We live with it, we have evolved with it as living beings, our cognitive and social skills have developed to handle the associated unpredictability. Managing uncertainty is the way we deal with the world’s complexity with our limited resources. We need to better understand these abilities and augment their power in order to better engineer resilience into our systems.

The chapter replaces the question of risk control by one about how we handle danger in our societies and realize a measure of safety. Ongoing practices in a framework of ‘danger cultures’ are the key. The case of environmental and health inspection and the intersecting ‘social worlds’ involved, are used as a case to indicate important features.

It is difficult to neutrally evaluate the risks posed by large-scale leading-edge science experiments. Traditional risk assessment is problematic in this context for multiple reasons. Also, such experiments can be insulated from challenge by manipulating how questions of risk are framed. Yet courts can and must evaluate these risks. In this chapter, I suggest modes of qualitative reasoning to facilitate such evaluation.

The city of Edo, early modern capital of Japan, was built of wood and burned with extraordinary frequency. This essay considers the logic of fire prevention and response in Edo in contrast to disaster management in the present day, with particular attention to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The comparison reveals that the emphasis in Edo on strength and continuity of the social order rather than preservation of material property produced a different view of risk and uncertainty.

Pretending to come to definite conclusions on uncertainty or uncertainties and how to live with it or them as safely as possible would have been pretentious. After all, uncertainty embodies to some extent the unknown.