Abstract

This paper contains a logic enabling us to reason in the presence of vague- ness phenomena. We consider an epistemological vagueness of concepts caused by the unavailability of total information about a continuous world which we describe in observational terms. Lack of information is manifested by the existence of borderline cases for concepts. Since we are unable to perceive concepts exactly, we cannot establish a sharp boundary between an extension of a concept and its complement. Some results for reasoning about vague concepts are already known in the literature [1], [2], [3], [4], [10]. Usually, a semantics of vague concepts is developed within the theory of fuzzy sets or the theory of supertruth [9]. Following the idea that reasoning about vague concepts requires a special logic, we introduce a propositional language with sentential operators en- abling us to dene positive, negative, and borderline regions of any vague concept. A semantics of the language is rened within a framework of the theory of rough sets . The admitted semantics provides means for dening extensions of concepts in a formal way. We show that these extensions re ect properly our intuition connected with vagueness. For ex- ample, the law of excluded middle is not valid on the level of extensions. Moreover, for any concept, the extensions of formulas representing its pos- itive, negative, and borderline regions provide a partition of a universe of discourse