Naming the Doubt: Kinds of Indeterminacy, Their Remedies, and an Ethics of Collapse

aDoubt is often reported as a single quantity, such as a probability or an interval. Yet doubt from too little evidence differs from doubt from two credible sources that point in opposite directions, and both differ from doubt about a concept with blurred edges. This article individuates kinds of indeterminacy by their remedy profiles: given a question, a goal and the available information, each response is licensed, an error or idle. Eight kinds emerge: scarcity, conflict, heterogeneity, vagueness, the open future, reasonable disagreement about values, partial identification and false presupposition. Western and non-Western sources supply a remedy for each. The main upshot is an ethics of collapse, which separates three operations: closing a question as true, choosing an action and simplifying a report. Acting under indeterminacy is often required and is not itself a fault. The fault lies in a simplified report that hides information that could change what its users do. Building on the representational risk of Harvard and Winsberg, we propose a principle of non-foreclosure: a report that others rely on must not hide a remedy that its evidence makes available and that could change what its users do. A worked example with a value-of-information calculation shows when auditing conflicting sources is worth more than a new trial, and what a typed report keeps that pooled credal and Dempster–Shafer reports can lose.