Why 6-Labels Uncertainty Scale in Geosciences: Probability-Based Explanation

To describe uncertainty in geosciences, several researchers have recently proposed a 6-labels uncertainty scale, in which one the labels corresponds to full certainty, one label to the absence of any knowledge, and the remaining four labels correspond to the degrees of confidence from the intervals [0, 0.25], [0.25, 0.5], [0.5, 0.75], and [0.75, 1]. Tests of this 6-labels scale indicate that it indeed conveys uncertainty information to geoscientists much more effectively than previously proposed uncertainty schemes. In this paper, we use probability-related techniques to explain this effectiveness.