Regimes of Fractured Objectivity

This paper argues that modern risk governance rests on a useful fiction: that technological safety can be rendered as objective fact. Within a “regime of functional objectivity,” institutions translate unruly hazards into standardized metrics that appear auditable, comparable, and decisive. That fiction works tolerably well because the uncertainties of most technologies can be bounded enough for regulation and coordination. The paper contends, however, that this regime has an epistemic boundary, past which the assumptions that support objectivity claims can no longer be safely ignored. Beyond this threshold lies a “regime of fractured objectivity,” where extreme stakes and sparse empirical feedback demand implausible certainty, small modeling choices dominate outcomes, and routine heuristics of expertise lose traction. The argument unfolds in four steps. First, it maps the civic epistemology that privileges technical consensus and procedural validation in technological risk, contrasting it with the plural, openly provisional treatment of economic risk. Second, it explains how this order is sustained by performances of objectivity that are methodologically valuable even if epistemologically fragile. Third, it draws on reactors to show how certain systems ‘fracture’ those performances by coupling catastrophic potential to hard limits on verification. Finally, it sketches the governance implications of operating beyond the boundary: cultivating varied expertise rather than a single authoritative voice, emphasizing resilience alongside risk calculation, and acknowledging that restraint may at times be the only responsible policy.