Uncertainty is an integral part of science. Without uncertainty, there will be no science.

What is it about?

Uncertainties are not exceptions in science. Rather, they are at the heart of scientific inquiries. Ideally and simplistically, research efforts would increase the clarify of our understanding of a target of interest and reduce the associated uncertainties. On the other hand, once the uncertainty is dropped low enough, researchers may lose their interest and turn their attention to something else that remains uncertain. We found many discrepancies in terms of interpretations of scientific activities from different conceptual and analytic perspectives could be explained consistently in terms of the role and dynamics of uncertainty.

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Why is it important?

When one source tells us it is quite safe to proceed and another source warns us a risk of looming dangers, how should we process such contradictory information? And we are not talking about Hamlet's tragedy. Uncertainties exist in scientific activities at many different levels of granularity. At the linguistic level, carefully articulated statements convey the nature of uncertainties. Paraphrases and citations may not always faithfully preserve the epistemic status of what is known and what is unknown. At a more fundamental level, one of the most profound bottlenecks in research and in communicating science to a broader audience and stakeholders is to make sense of the potentially large number of seemingly contradictory explanations of the same target. In this book, our goal is to draw your attention to the role and the nature of a variety of types of uncertainties in representing scientific knowledge and how scientific knowledge is communicated by researchers.