Kinds of Uncertainty

To understand decisionmaking under uncertainty, one should begin by dissecting uncertainty. Section 2.1: Uncertainty includes both the aleatory kind, which probability and multivalent logic recognize, and also epistemic uncertainty, which traditional probability cannot handle but multivalent logic can. Aleatory uncertainty refers to the kind that comes from a process that appears random to us. Epistemic uncertainty refers to the kind that comes from the ignorance left by incomplete, inconclusive, ambiguous, dissonant, or unreliable evidence, from the indeterminacy produced by the vagueness of our concepts and expressed perceptions of the real world, and from the limits on our imaginative powers as to what we do not know. Section 2.2: For accurate factfinding, we need to utilize a method that can handle both kinds of uncertainty.