title: Coping with uncertainty
title: aporia and play in actuarial and financial practices
titleType: Subtitle
Creators: name: Fytros, Charalampos
Publisher: name: Lancaster University
Year: 2018
Subjects: aporia
actuarial
financial economics
heidegger
derrida

description: This thesis aims to bring into sharp focus a contradiction that seems to
      persist in actuarial and financial practice. Specifically, how efforts to
      manage the uncertain and potentially catastrophic future, via actuarial
      and financial calculative modeling, fail precisely where they succeed. The
      purpose is to disclose that the problem with such efforts is not that they
      are not yet scientifically sophisticated enough, nor that they frequently
      lack the intuitive judgement which experienced practitioners can bring.
      Rather, it is that our certainties, which may have either a technical or
      judgmental origin, are always and already permeated by uncertainties, and
      vice versa. Thus, what this thesis aims to show is the radical and
      inescapable entanglement of certainty with uncertainty, or of the
      technical with the social, which is not simply complementary or
      oppositional, but in a more fundamental way, aporetic. This aporetic
      entanglement is conceptualized within the thesis as an ongoing play of
      difference. Specifically, a play that is ontological and central to what
      sustains actuarial practice exactly as that.
      
      The thesis consists of three papers. The first one focuses on the
      financial markets and aims to disclose, following a Heideggerian analysis,
      how investing is ontologically dependent on a prior understanding that
      dictates what counts as significant, or not. In this respect, financial
      markets are conditioned not just by the social/technical entanglement, but
      also by a further entanglement among different styles of understanding.
      
      The second paper focuses on the liability side of insurance companies and
      argues that the so-called financialization of insurance liabilities (i.e.,
      the requirement for a market-consistent valuation of them) does not
      uncritically expand financial economics (i.e., practices oriented towards
      the market with a dominant technicalizing aspect) at the expense of
      actuarial logics (i.e., practices oriented towards the underlying
      liabilities with an effective contextualizing aspect). Rather, a Derridean
      autoimmunity process is revealed – one that “auto-deconstructs” the
      financial sovereign of the market-consistent valuation into its actuarial
      “other”.
      
      The third paper focuses on Solvency II, the new regulatory framework for
      EU insurers since 2016. By taking a close look at the quantitative and
      qualitative requirements of the new framework, the paper claims that the
      regulatory text and its accompanying algorithm can never be made
      unambiguous, or free from fundamental paradoxes. However, instead of
      adding confusion, this paradoxical quasi-structure ultimately increases
      the possibilities for understanding the subtleties of the insurance
      business and its solvency issues. In this context, the paper reconsiders
      performativity as a play of differences – a rethinking that focuses more
      decisively on not knowing, rather than on what can be rendered knowable.