Rationalization, enchantment, and subjectivation – lessons for risk communication from a New Phenomenology of everyday reasoning

Abstract

The success of risk communication in democratic societies depends on a good understanding of people’s knowledge and ways of reasoning, which requires a broader perspective of ‘societal risk communication’. This includes all kinds of rationales how people and social institutions communicate, make sense of, and engage with risk and uncertainty to better understand the epistemological challenges for risk communication by experts and social decision-makers. For this purpose, we utilize insights from New Phenomenology and specify three rationales how people and social institutions engage with risk and uncertainty, following earlier work: ‘rational’ evidence-based modes of engaging with risk are accompanied by ‘non-rational’ (e.g. faith, hope) and ‘in-between’ modes (e.g. intuition, trust). In everyday life these idealtype modes rarely occur in pure but modified form. Therefore, we advance Zinn’s original work by introducing a dynamic model of decision-making under risk and uncertainty along the three types drawing on New Phenomenology. There are systematic differences in the embodied and the abstract forms of knowledge people refer to when making sense of risk and uncertainty while the abstract forms differ in their empirical saturation. The dynamized framework helps to understand institutional challenges as well as people’s sense-making, which show tendencies of ‘rationalization’, ‘enchantment’ and ‘subjectivation’.

Keywords:

• Risk communication
• New Phenomenology
• rationalization
• enchantment
• subjectivation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We use the terms ‘embodied’, ‘bodily sensations’, ‘bodiliness’ and so on as synonymous. They all denote such subjective and non-reflexive experiences that occur to the self perceptibly, involuntarily, and, though subjective, highly evident.

2 A similar argument has been made by the Danish philosopher Knud Ejler Løgstrup who emphasised the original character of trust as a spontaneous attitude in contrast to reflexive and calculative concepts of trust (Frederiksen 2016, 53f).

3 All quotations from sources in German language are translated by the authors.

4 In rejection of radical manifestations of social constructivism, Schmitz stresses that ‘sense-making’ is always the result of the situational given (subjective facts) on the one hand and its culturally shaping systematization (objectified facts) on the other.

5 Only in exceptional cases there could be a tendency of completely decoupling embodied and reflexive forms of knowledge. Extremely abstract mathematical models or inexpressible sensations of a subject would be such examples.

6 A similar point has been made by Patrick Brown (2009, 396f) referring to A. Schütz’s phenomenology emphasising that the abstract knowledge has to be connected to life world reasoning to become effective.