TitleAn information-based discussion of vagueness
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2001
AuthorsDubois D, Esteva F, Godo L, Prade H
Conference NameProceedings of 10th IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems (FUZZ-IEEE 2001)

The issue of understanding and modeling vagueness has been addressed by many authors, especially in the second half of the XXieth century. They are mainly philosophers, logicians, psychologists, and computer scientists. Often these authors have privileged one type or one view of vagueness and tried to provide some representation scheme for this view using some formalism on hand. In this paper, we try to provide an organized discussion of different categories of vagueness, pointing out in what circumstances they appear. However they have in common to lead to a trichotomy of the universe of discourse, which seems to be the common feature of the different forms of vagueness. Basic representations frameworks are proposed for each case. In each situation, we examine how a fuzzy set-based, similarity-based, or uncertainty-based representation can take place, which thus gives birth to a different type of graded construction in each case. Generally speaking, the main contribution of the paper is to provide an organized view of situations where vagueness takes place, on the basis of a generic information modelling framework. This means that the paper does not advocate particular representation tools against others for a particular type of vagueness, but rather identify the characteristic features which have to be modelled in each case.