ABSTRACT
The state claims that biosecurity policy is guided by science. By this token, science is politicised: expert knowledge on the specific is called to apply on the universal. Still, what science is this? Biosecurity is a protective intervention, one that addresses the future aiming to avert undesirable developments. Three such, protective and future-oriented, epistemologies are distinguished by their attitude to causality: prevention, which is based on scientific certainty; precaution, based on uncertainty; and pre-emption, based on unknowability. Biosecurity presents an abundance of precautionary elements, but these operate within a broader framework provided by pre-emption, the epistemic modality marked by indifference to causality. Notably, pre-emption is the par excellence epistemic modality of intelligence. Thus, along science, intelligence is the other regime of knowledge that informs biosecurity. Its foundational epistemological premise — the certainty of the threat's existence combined with unknowability of its causes and forms — defines biosecurity.
