We are grateful for Holmes and Westgren’s (2020) thoughtful response to our recent article (Packard & 872 Academy of Management Review October Clark, 2020a). In it, they argued that “a mitigability– immitigability axis does not map well onto the aleatory–epistemic uncertainty axis” (p. 7). This challenge to our delineation casts doubt to its usefulness in strategic theorizing, as we have supposed. They thus proposed a revision to our definitions that encapsulates epistemic uncertainty within the confines of the present state of knowledge and the costs of acquiring such knowledge, allowing strategic analysis of the value of mitigation efforts to be more clearly assessed. While we are open minded toward such a revision to our framework, we do not see the proposed revision as a clear advancement over our original model, for reasons that we shall here expound
