Cindynics, The Science of Danger

2The Usefulness of the Cindynics Approach and Method

Let us recall here the capital importance of exploring, prior to any investigation on risk, the state of vulnerability of activity situations.

2.1. The situation, the founding concept of cindynics

Any situation evolves inexorably with time through transformation operators (see Chapter 1, section 1.1). Kervern and his team then relied on the concept of propensity, “an inherent tendency to change that manifests itself in all of the entities of the dynamic universe in which we live” [BEL 95, p. 203]. They concluded that the inevitable evolution of situations generates a propensity to direct them towards the emergence of a favorable or unfavorable outcome.

Therefore, the conditions conducive to this transformation are potentially in place in the activity situation. Consequently, for the unfavorable aspects, it is not just a matter of avoiding the occurrence of a feared event (preventive action) or reducing its consequences (corrective action), but of preventing the activity situation from diverting under the effect of risk sources that occur without our realization. The detection, identification and characterization of the transformation operators find their importance in an anticipated and proactive approach to the analysis of activity situations.

By setting themselves the goal of comparing different moments in the activity situation using the concepts and methods they developed, researchers who were particularly interested ...