Elogio dell’incertezza. Decisori e osservatori nella società moderna

That uncertainty is a fundamental resource for decision-making processes has been known for some time, especially in organizational studies, which mostly refer to probabilistic evaluation, heuristics, cognitive biases, risk assessment and more. The article starts from the assumption that uncertainty is always uncertainty of an observer and hypothesizes that the subsystems of modern society must produce it in specific forms in order to operate (decide) and to be able to construct the reality to which they refer. In particular, three particularly evident cases of self-produced uncertainty are analyzed: science, law and politics. These subsystems create an uncertain future in the form of oscillation (respectively experiment, sentence, elections), and then entrust the result to their specific networks of observations (publications, jurisprudence, public opinion). Among other things, this requires the redefinition of the identifying concepts of these subsystems (objective reality, justice, legitimation) in a procedural (therefore decisional) and no longer substantial form. Only in this way is it possible, today, to build the reality on which society communicates.