Coping with uncertainty: Assessing nanotechnologies in a citizen panel in Switzerland

The policy shift towards "upstream public engagement" requires dealing with a lack of individual and stabilized scientific knowledge that accompanies any early stage of research and development. This article examines how actors cope with this epistemic uncertainty when deliberating emerging technologies. Analyzing the arguments of the participants in a Swiss citizen panel on nanotechnology, the article explores how actors form their opinions in an epistemically nonstabilized situation. The article shows how actors develop a strategy to handle this situation: analogies, such as to other risk technologies or "nature," and personal experiences as patients and consumers are used as interpretive patterns and serve as tools to cope with the unknown. Focusing on the ways uncertainty is handled, this approach is differentiated from other models to explain public attitudes toward emerging technologies, such as the "scientific literacy model" or the "cognitive miser model".