Reasoning with doubly uncertain soft constraints

We describe the basic ideas of the theory of approximate reasoning and indicate how it provides a framework for representing human sourced soft information. We discuss how to translate linguistic knowledge into formal representations using generalized constraints. We consider the inference process within the theory of approximate reasoning and introduce the entailment principle and describe its centrality to this inference process. Next we introduce the idea of doubly uncertain statements such as John's friend is young. In these statements there exists uncertainty both with respect to value of the age, young, and the object associated with the age, John's friend. We suggest a method for representing these complex statements and investigate the problem of making inferences about specific objects.