Abstract

Contemporary society has elevated the concept of risk to the status of dogma. That this concept may be converted to a mathematical-probabilistic measure supposedly offers security and control over contingencies and random events. Probabilistic risk is part of the current societal obsession with quantification for grasping realities and making forecasts. The disproportionate use of the notion of risk places many different phenomena under the same conceptual umbrella, subjecting them to the reductionist criteria of rule by calculation. I put forward the concept of riscophrenia to describe this tendency. This chapter criticises riscophrenia, that is to say, the inflated use of the notion of risk and the fallacy that chance can be eliminated, knowing that such efforts are inglorious, neglect the prudential principle, and may produce new unpredictabilities and uncertainties. Risk analyses are unable to question the fundamental reasoning embedded in the instrumental vision which permeates modernity. They not only adjust themselves to the model which produces those problems, but also legitimise, justify and ratify it.