Risk communication with generalized uncertainty and linguistics

Civil Engineers have the opportunity and obligation to lead society to more effective decision-making for built environment risk trade-offs. This paper addresses the gap between classical mathematical analysis and the linguistic-based issues and factors that play a major role on societal decisions. A large stumbling block is the utilization of the fairly extensive literature in social psychology related to risk avoidance, in formal mathematical decision frameworks based on probabilistic analysis. Fundamental principles of generalized information theory may be helpful in casting sociological considerations of perceived risk into linguistic frameworks so that the mathematics of information theory can be applied to develop decision guidelines. Fuzzy set theory is one example where probability-based uncertainty has been broadened to incorporate linguistic input. Other examples are monotone measures, such as Mobius representations, imprecise probabilities and decision weights, as well as Shannon entropy.