Everything Is a Matter of Degree: The Main Idea Behind Fuzzy Logic Is Useful in Geosciences and in Authorship

Authors

Christian Servin, El Paso Community CollegeFollow
Aaron Velasco, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow
Edgar Daniel Rodriguez Velasquez, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow
Vladik Kreinovich, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow

Publication Date

4-1-2023

Comments

Technical Report: UTEP-CS-23-06a

To appear in Proceedings of the 2023 Annual Conference of the North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society NAFIPS'2023, Cincinnati, Ohio, May 31 - June 2, 2023.

Abstract

This paper presents two applications of the general principle -- the everything is a matter of degree -- the principle that underlies fuzzy techniques. The first -- qualitative -- application helps explain the fact that while most earthquakes occur close to faults (borders between tectonic plates or terranes), earthquakes have also been observed in areas which are far away from the known faults. The second -- more quantitative -- application is to the problem of which of the collaborators should be listed as authors and which should be simply thanked in the paper. We argue that the best answer to this question is to explicitly state the degree of authorship -- in contrast to the usual yes-no approach. We also show how to take into account that this degree can be estimated only with some uncertainty -- i.e., that we need to deal with interval-valued degrees.