The Scope of Inductive Risk and the Case for Ontic Risk
Joeri Witteveen11 June 2026
The Argument from Inductive Risk (AIR) has profoundly shaped debates about values in science, yet significant ambiguity persists about its scope. While many authors treat inductive risk as one among several epistemic risks, there is little agreement about how such risks should be demarcated, or even on what basis. I argue that greater clarity can be achieved through a tripartite framework of claim, frame, and aim decisions, distinguished by the contingencies that prompt them and the error-management strategies they call for.
Claim decisions concern truth-apt matters that risk factual error, thereby instantiating the familiar balancing of false positives against false negatives that lies at the heart of traditional accounts of inductive risk. Frame and aim decisions, by contrast, either do not require inherently value-laden error management or involve value-laden trade-offs that do not concern error possibilities at all. This analysis supports an understanding of inductive risk confined to claim decisions, and challenges the idea that other decision types generate complementary forms of value-laden epistemic risk.
The upshot is not merely corrective but also constructive: it brings into view a structurally novel form of error risk arising within a subset of claim decisions whose outcomes feed back on the very states of affairs they concern, recursively reshaping the likelihood of factual error. I develop this notion of ontic risk through an example drawn from species classification at the boundary between taxonomy and conservation, where conservation actions triggered by a classificatory decision can themselves help establish or dissolve the species status it ascribes.
