Chapter 10 - (Un)Certainties

Summary

With this chapter, we deal with the problem of research ‘uncertainty’: how it is defined and dealt with in the standard praxis of psychological research. It stresses that the idea of measurement ‘error’ (in the sense of variability) is predominantly valid under a substance ontology. The processual alternative is described, stemming from a complex dynamic systems framework, which embraces variability, a fuzziness of category boundaries, and multiplicity. As the notion of uncertainty is also inextricably linked with the fundamental concept of probability, we present a processual framework for understanding probability.